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Mobile Market Matures
The largest mobile market in Africa is still growing
Nigeria overtook South Africa in 2008 to become the biggest mobile market on the African continent. Mobile phones have transformed the telecommunications sector in the country since their introduction in 2001. In that year, the country had just 0.73% teledensity – and the number of fixed lines has not changed significantly since then, with only 1% of the population having a fixed line by April 2010. But as fixed lines stayed stagnant, mobile subscriptions boomed: by the end of April 2010, there were 77,395,332 active mobile subscriptions in Nigeria, representing a mobile penetration rate of 55.3%. By 2014, the country is expected to have 118 million mobile subscribers.
The first GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) licences were issued in 2001, to M-Tel, part of national fixed-line operator Nitel, to South African company MTN and to a local consortium led by Zimbabwe’s Econet Wireless, since acquired by Zain Group. Globacom became the country’s fourth mobile operator when it was awarded a GSM licence together with its fixed-line Second National Operator licence in 2002. In 2008, UAE operator Etisalat entered the market as Nigeria’s fifth GSM provider.
While GSM still dominates, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is playing an increasingly important role in the mobile market – from just 1% market share at the end of 2007, CDMA operators had a combined 10% of the mobile market at the end of April 2010. Nigeria has four CDMA operators offering mobile services: Visafone, Multilinks, Starcomms and Zoom.
Nigeria’s telecoms regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has announced that mobile number portability will be introduced in the second half of 2010, allowing subscribers to switch between networks without changing their phone number. The NCC is also continuing its drive to curb the use of mobiles in crime by requiring mobile phone users to register their SIM cards.
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