Kenya: Goodbye Celtel? (Kenya)
Celtel International is considering a major re-branding strategy that would see it drop the ‘Celtel’ brand and adopt a completely new identity – Zain. The plan is expected to create unique difficulties in Kenya and Nigeria, where the Celtel brand is still quite new, as well as across all non-Arab operations. It is part of a long-term strategy by Kuwait’s MTC Group, which owns the mobile telephone operator, to re-invent itself through the launch of a global brand.
MTC, which has expanded significantly through acquisitions, is seeking to consolidate recent growth under one banner. “We have a new brand that will be launched as single global brand for all our operations,” Dr Saad Al-Barrak, MTC’s deputy chairman and chief executive officer, said recently. “We will start any new operation with this new global brand.”
Controversy
Controversy has already erupted over the brand name chosen. Critics feel Zain, leaked in Kuwait in early August, has limited appeal to cultures outside the Arab world. A recent valuation of MTC by analysts from investment banker Morgan Stanley found that Africa accounted for 70 per cent of the company’s fair value.
MTC Chairman, Mr Asa’ad Al Banwan , Celtel International Chairman, Mr Mo Ibrahim, and MTC Deputy Chairman & Managing Director, Dr Saad Al-Barrak. Photo by MTC
The new logo has also been described as too dark and moody. The re-branding process has reportedly begun in Kuwait and is expected to spread to other MTC-branded operations in the Middle East.
Change will come to Africa and its Celtel-branded operations from 2008. The new changes come shortly after a regional marketing blitz to announce the expansion of Celtel’s borderless mobile network to include the Republic of Congo, Gabon and Democratic Republic of Congo. The service was previously limited to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The decision to re-brand will create a costly marketing and logistical challenge for the Kenya and Nigeria operations, given that the two only recently re-branded to Celtel from KenCell and V-Mobile respectively.
The change from KenCell, which began in 2004, is yet to be completed by Celtel Kenya: Many of their telephone booths – admittedly an atrophied part of the business – are still branded KenCell. Nigeria’s switch from VMobile, which began last year, will also have to be scrapped.
A huge task
Speaking to FS during the Second Annual Connecting Rural Communities Africa Forum in Nairobi, Mr Mwaghazi Mwachofi, Celtel International Vice-President for Regulatory Affairs, confirmed that discussions on rebranding were in progress. “Nothing has been decided as yet, nothing concrete,” Mwachofi said when pressed on the matter.
“The Celtel brand is strong and powerful and re-branding is huge task.” MTC Kuwait is also expected to form a new subsidiary, MTC International, as a private company to hold all the MTC Group’s foreign assets and operations.
A newspaper report on the plan several weeks ago saw the Kuwait Stock Exchange halt trading in MTC shares pending clarification of the issues raised.
A local Arabic-language daily had reported that MTC was going to form an entity with $1.73 billion (Sh116 billion) in capital as an umbrella company under which MTC Kuwait and MTC International, called Zain, would operate.
The paper had also said the international unit would sell a stake – possibly 40 per cent or more – in an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange next year. The re-branding confirms MTC’s ambitions to become one of the biggest mobile operators in the world.
The strategy
According Al-Barrak, the company was looking for a global brand that would work from China to Gabon, in Rio-de-Janeiro and Madras, in Moscow and Iceland. Currently, MTC is looking to fill gaps in sub-Saharan Africa – for example Angola Ethiopia and Senegal – and eyeing Saudi Arabia’s third licence. The company is also making noises about moving its headquarters because of Kuwait’s investor-unfriendly laws.
“The Kuwaiti business environment repels investment and the country’s laws are not good for a financial hub,” Al-Barrak was recently quoted as saying. Kuwait has been dragging its feet on reforms to create a more transparent stock exchange.
Another Kuwaiti law imposes a 55 per cent tax on foreign investors. MTC, Kuwait’s largest publicly traded company, said last week that it could move to Dubai or Bahrain, the Gulf’s financial centres, or to Amsterdam, headquarters of its subsidiary Celtel. The firm operates in Bahrain in partnership with Britain’s Vodafone Group and acquired Netherlands-based Celtel in 2005. It has no presence in Dubai. “MTC is today thinking on the global scale… especially since Kuwait accounts for only 15 per cent of its revenue, (a figure that) will fall below seven per cent in the next two years.” Incorporated in 1983 in Kuwait, MTC now has a presence in 20 countries.
The Group is a leading mobile operator in six Middle Eastern and 14 sub-Saharan African countries providing a comprehensive range of mobile voice and data services to over 29.7 million active individual and business customers.
It operates in Kuwait and Bahrain as MTCVodafone, in Jordan as Fastlink, in Iraq as MTC-Atheer, in Lebanon as MTC-Touch and in Sudan as Mobitel. It also has 14 operations in sub-Saharan Africa as Celtel. These are Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. The company has also won Saudi Arabia’s third mobile license and is expected to roll-out a network soon. The change of identity is part of MTC’s plan to re-brand its operations across all networks in line with their “three by three by three (3x3x3)” strategy.
Ethiopia to provide 1.2 million phones for millennium guests(Ethiopia)
Ethiopia will have1.2 million mobile phones available for sale to the hundreds of thousands of tourists and Ethiopians living abroad who are expected to visit the country to celebrate the Ethiopian millennium, which falls on 12 September. Ethiopia is the only country in the world to have preserved the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox faith-based Julian calendar, which is seven years behind the Gregorian calendar used by the rest of the world. Both the UN and the African Union have recognised the Ethiopian millennium as a unique African occasion, dubbing it the ‘African Millennium’. Expected guests include African heads of state and musicians Beyonce Knowles and Michael Jackson. According to Ethiopia Telecommunication Corporation (ETC), the handsets will afford tourists access to various special services including audio and video data.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
IFC invests USD32.5m in African cable project
The World Bank’s International Finance Corp (IFC) has announced it will invest USD32.5 million in a fibre-optic cable project that will provide internet and international communication services for 21 African countries. The IFC, the private-sector arm of the World Bank that focuses on investing in emerging market economies, said the cable project should improve telecommunications access for 250 million Africans and cut costs for individuals and businesses. The project, called the East African Submarine Cable System, is to run 10,000 kilometres from the continent’s southern tip to the African horn. It will connect South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan. A further 13 countries will share the system through land links. They are Botswana, Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Mohsen Khalil, IFC’s director of global information and communications technologies, said in an interview the project’s total cost will be USD235 million and said it is a cooperative effort between private and public interests designed to ensure that prices do not fall under monopoly control and rise. ‘Consumers along the east coast of Africa typically pay between USD200 and USD300 a month for internet access,’ the IFC said. ‘As a result of this project, prices for international connectivity will drop by two-thirds at the outset and the number of subscribers will triple.’ Construction is to start within weeks and the cable is scheduled to be in operation by early 2009.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
ZTE wins USD200 million order from Ethiopia
Telegeography writes…ZTE Corp has won a USD200 million contract to supply equipment to Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp (ETC). The three-year agreement will include CDMA-based wireless network equipment. China agreed to invest USD1.5 billion in Ethiopia’s telecommunications networks in February. The Chinese government also agreed to loan Ethiopia USD500 million and make provision for an additional USD1.5 billion in short-term trade credits.
For Celtel’s Mo Ibrahim, the poorest of the poor are his raison d’etre
Mo Ibrahim: Revolutionising communications in Africa. His tool? The mobile phone
For a man who describes himself as a former Marxist???, Mo Ibrahim has clearly made his peace with the forces of capitalism.
The chairman of the fastest-growing mobile phone group in sub-Saharan African, talks with relish of breaking down the Arab business world’s wariness towards his continent, of cellphones making the internet virtually redundant. Few inventions can boast as dramatic an impact on society as the mobile phone in Africa. Embraced there long before it became commonplace in the west, the technology allows Africans to communicate in spite of fraying landlines, and from areas that colonial-era networks never reached.
Mobiles have helped ordinary citizens free themselves from the grip of the state.
The Kenyan farmer who was once obliged to sell his coffee beans in a fug of uncertainty can now check world prices; the small entrepreneur whose business depended on the whims of a government agency can now operate from any kiosk. Mobiles even play a role in the democratic process, as formerly corrupt officials in remote constituencies are confronted by the vigilant election monitor, phone in hand.
No wonder that Africa is the first continent where mobile phones outnumber fixed lines. Yet that revolution is still in its infancy. When we started in 1998 there were two million cellphones on the continent. Now there are over 100 million, but a quarter are in South Africa,??? says Ibrahim. There’s still a huge amount to do.???
Ibrahim, who has British nationality but was born a Sudanese Nubian, had his brainwave in 1969. Rushing to a screening of Charlton Heston’s epic Khartoum, he jumped into a taxi and became intrigued by the cab radio. ‘How are you communicating?’ I asked the driver.
‘How does the signal reach the car without direct line of sight?’???
This question became the focus of several degrees, and Ibrahim then joined BT, where he played a part establishing Britain’s first mobile network, before setting up an international consultancy firm. But Africa remained his passion, and he was appalled at the assumption among potential investors that the continent was a place where contracts would not be respected. We said to ourselves, ‘Who’s afraid of Africa?’ and set out to do something different, to build a European-quality company with the best equipment . . . which said from the outset, ‘We will not pay a single dollar in bribes’.???
Today Celtel has more than seven million customers, employs 3,500 staff and boasts 120,000 points of sale. While dwarfed by Vodacom and MTN, it is the only mobile network to see the poorest of the poor as its raison d’etre. Such figures leave vast room for expansion and may explain why in May the Kuwaiti mobile operator MTC bought Celtel for $3.4bn, yet left the company free to continue operating as a separate entity.
Ibrahim, a pipe-smoking, compact ball of energy, aims to raise market penetration in Celtel’s target areas to 20 per cent by 2015. He enthuses over the opportunities represented by challenging countries such as poverty-stricken Ethiopia and war-scarred Angola. Up till now everyone has focused on the cities, bypassing villages and hamlets. We want to focus on cut-off rural areas, which is why we are looking at solar energy.???
He does not underplay the frustrations of operating in Africa, expressing exasperation at governments’ love of red tape and their preference for trading with former western masters rather than one another, a damaging legacy of colonialism. He recalls how Celtel challenged the absurd system which dictated that calls between Brazzaville and Kinshasa, two capitals facing one another across the Congo River, were routed via France and Belgium, at international rates.
Interestingly, he is sceptical about the other great change that has swept Africa in recent years: the internet. Computers are very expensive and they need power, and that can be a problem in Africa. SMS text messaging is replacing e-mail and, more and more, phones are carrying out the functions of the computer.???
Ibrahim’s success has given him a huge reach. He is finalising plans for a $100m personal foundation to fund development projects in Africa – investment with a heart???, he calls it. For him, Africa’s salvation lies in private sector efforts, rather than the western-funded, more-aid-please approach favoured by Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa. It’s great that Africa is on the agenda and Blair and Brown are interested. But I’m resigned to doing my own little things in my own little way.???
Source- http://www.vanguardngr.com
Chinese firms to invest $1.5b updating Ethiopia’s telephone network
Three Chinese firms will invest $1.5 billion over the next four years to upgrade Ethiopia’s telephone system, officials said.
Huawei Technologies, China International Telecommunication Construction, and ZTE, plan to expand the network as part of one of the largest financial investments ever made in the impoverished Horn of Africa nation, officials said.
The companies were from among eight international bidders, among them Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens.
The firms aim to boost mobile phone users from the current 1.5 million customers to seven million. Fixed lines will be quadrupled from 1 million to 4 million users.
The project represents a huge investment in Ethiopia where annual incomes are just $100 and the annual gross domestic product just $8 billion.
The country frequently suffers severe food shortages and is unable to feed its 77 million people without foreign aid.
“It should be a significant improvement in our country’s telecom system,” said Abdurahim Ahmed, spokesman of the Ethiopian Ministry of Telecommunications. “It will even deliver services to very remote areas and expanding on already existing services in the urban centers, along with improvements in the mobile network system.”
The Ethiopian government was seeking others to invest an extra $900 million needed to completely overhaul the telecommunications infrastructure, he said.
Chinese officials were not immediately available for comment.
China is eager to expand relations with Africa, offering aid, trade and investment deals to gain access to markets and oil supplies.
Source- http://www.telecomasia.net
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