Telecom Lead Africa: 3G subscriptions — both CDMA2000 and WCDMA — represent 11 percent of the overall African market, while 27 percent of the market relies on 2.5G access technologies for mobile data access.
Subscriptions are dominated by voice communications and text messaging in the form of GSM, with 62.7 percent.
In Q3 2012, the 54 countries and 1.08 billion people have accumulated 821 million subscriptions, up 16.9 percent year-on-year. At present, cellular subscription penetration stands at 76.4 percent.
In the first quarter of 2013, cellular penetration will eclipse 80 percent.
The cellular market in Africa is expected to grow to 1.12 billion by 2017, contributing 13.9 percent to take the global cellular market to 8.11 billion.
Given the fact that a significant percentage of prepaid users maintain more than one active prepaid subscription to minimize interconnection charges, there is still subscriber growth to be had. “While Western Europe languishes with barely positive overall growth quarter-on-quarter, Africa managed to generate 4.2 percent growth in the same period,” said Marina Lu, research associate, ABI Research.
Given the lack of access to credit card and banking facilities, the vast majority of subscriber’s access mobile phone services through prepaid. In South Africa, prepaid ratios for the operators range from 70 percent to 86 percent but most other countries prepaid ratios stand at over 95 percent, if not close to 99 percent.
The top 7 power houses of the region are:
MTN Nigeria—43.2m subscriptions
Vodacom—37.7m subscriptions
Vodafone Egypt—37.5m subscriptions
MobiNil—32.4m subscriptions
MTN South Africa—23.5m subscriptions
Etisalat Misr—22.9m subscriptions
Glo Mobile—22.0m subscriptions
