Zanzibar Telecom (Zantel), a 51%-owned subsidiary of Emirates Telecommunications Corp (Etisalat), hopes to capture as much as 35% of the domestic mobile market by 2011 on the back of rising economic growth in the country, reports Reuters citing a company spokesman as saying. According to Zantel’s Chief Financial Officer Arthur Hudson, the group currently has roughly 10% of the market, equivalent to around a million users, but hopes to increase this to reach 30% to 35% of the market in the next two to three years. ‘There is huge growth potential in Tanzania with only 20% market penetration,’ he said. Hudson went on to say that the operator, currently the smallest Tanzanian cellco by subscribers behind Vodacom, Celtel and MIC Tanzania (Tigo), is halfway to completing a USD100 million network upgrade designed to provide access to 2.2 million customers by 2009. In phase two of the expansion project, Zantel’s CFO said the company would spend a similar amount again to boost network capacity to five million users.
By the end of March 2008 Vodacom was the largest mobile operator in Tanzania with an estimated four million customers, up from 3.87 million at the start of the year, followed by Celtel Tanzania with 2.59 million, Tigo (1.45 million) and Zantel, with a million. More than nine of out ten Tanzanians are now reported to have access to a mobile phone, even if not one of their own, by using public wireless payphone alternatives such as Vodacom’s People’s Phone service.
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Sasktel International of Canada has been awarded a three-year contract by the government of Tanzania to assume management control of national PTO the Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL). The new management will take over from 1 July 2007 and be responsible for all the Tanzanian firm’s operations, maintenance and expansion in order to improve its financial, commercial and technical performance. In a statement the government said: ‘The decision to put TTCL under an independent management was reached by its shareholders — the government and the Celtel International — who agreed that this was the best strategy to make TTCL operate more efficiently in the prevailing free market economy.’
According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database, TTCL is Tanzania’s primary provider of fixed line services but its record on providing access has been poor and it faces stiff competition from the country’s mobile operators. By the end of 2006 around 250,000 lines had been installed, with connections concentrated in the urban areas and a few semi-rural communities, but only around 160,000 were lines in service, representing a teledensity of just 0.4%. By contrast the nation’s four mobile operators — Vodacom Tanzania, Celtel Tanzania, MIC Tanzania (which operates under the brand name Tigo) and Zantel — collectively reported 5.59 million customers at the end of 2006, a cellular penetration rate of 14.6%, up from 3.40 million users the previous year.
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Reuters writes…The number of Tanzanian mobile phone subscribers has more than doubled to nearly 6.5 million from just under 3 million in 2005, and is continuing to rise by more than 1,000 a day, President Jakaya Kikwete said. The east African nation liberalised its telecoms industry in 2005, introducing a technology-neutral regulation system that let companies offer services such as Internet, payphones and mobile telephony under one licence.
The new firms have provided stiff competition to former fixed-line monopoly Tanzania Telecommunications Company (TTCL).
“At the moment we have almost 6.5 million mobile phone subscribers … It is estimated there are more than 1,000 new subscribers every day,” Kikwete told visiting telecoms executives on Monday, according to a copy of his speech seen by Reuters.
“We think the number is set to increase in coming years which underscores the popularity of the mobile phone (here).”
Tanzania has four mobile operators — Zantel, a joint venture with Emirates Telecommunications Corp. (Etisalat) , Vodacom, joint-owned by Vodafone (VOD.L: Quote, Profile , Research) and fixed-line firm Telkom (TKGJ.J: Quote, Profile , Research), Celtel, owned by Kuwait’s MTC (TELE.KW: Quote, Profile , Research) and Millicom International Cellular’s (MICC.O: Quote, Profile , Research) Tigo.
Zantel, which is based on the semi-autonomous Zanzibar archipelago, also competes with TTCL on the Tanzanian mainland.
The country of 39 million people is among 12 regional states planning to build a 9,900 km (6,150 mile) undersea fibre optic cable linking South Africa to Sudan and connecting landlocked nation countries in between with terrestrial cables.
Kikwete said the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) — which is set to launch by the end of 2008 — would extend communications to Tanzanian villages with private sector help.
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Etisalat’s Zantel unit looking to capture 35% market share within three years
