Synopsis
Nigeria has overtaken South Africa to become the continent’s largest mobile market with now close to 100 million subscribers, and yet market penetration stands at only around 60% in early 2012. Subscriber growth had slowed significantly during the global economic crisis, re-accelerated in 2010 but then slowed again in 2011. Much of the remaining addressable market is in the country’s rural areas where network rollouts and operations are expensive. This in combination with declining ARPU levels is forcing the networks to streamline their operations and to develop new revenue streams from services such as third generation (3G) mobile broadband, mobile payments/banking, and others. At the same time the operators are rolling out national fibre backbone networks to support the ever increasing demand for bandwidth. At least two operators are rolling out fourth generation (4G) LTE networks.
How difficult it is to succeed in Nigeria's highly competitive mobile market became evident with the failure of Multi-Links in 2011 in which seasoned heavyweight Telkom South Africa lost almost its entire investment. M-Tel, the mobile arm of the national telco Nitel is in liquidation following a decade of failed privatisation attempts.
This report contains a market overview and analysis, key statistics, regulatory issues, profiles of major players, including financial results where available, and two scenario forecasts for the mobile market in 2013 and 2016.
Companies covered in this report:
- MTN Nigeria;
- Glo Mobile (Globacom);
- Bharti Airtel (formerly Zain, Celtel);
- Visafone;
- EMTS (Mubadala, Etisalat);
- M-Tel (Nitel);
- Multi-Links (Telkom SA);
- Starcomms;
- Reliance;
- Intercellular;
- Zoda Fones.
