Rich Pickings for Mobile Phone Investors
Investors in the mobile phone sector are likely to get quick returns for their money if they choose the African continent a new survey by telecoms infrastructure firm Ericsson shows.
The survey notes that there is a surge in mobile phone usage in African countries, which has pushed the global subscription to the five billion mark.
It has taken less than 18 months to enlist one billion people to mobile phones, the report shows, adding that the main drivers of growth continue to be Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, which together accounted for 80 per cent of global subscription.
Emerging markets growth is driven by value addition such as the mobile money transfer services that the operators are rolling out.
In Kenya, people who don’t have access to a bank or a bank account are increasingly turning to mobile money transfer services such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa or Zain’s Zap to send money.
Recently a new initiative dubbed M-Kesho, Swahili for tomorrow was launched – the innovation turns mobile phone accounts to automatic Bank accounts with only the phone as the teller and paperwork to deposit and withdraw and even access credit.
Fishermen and farmers can get quick updates on sudden changes in the weather forecast, villagers can get local medical care, and children can access online education, says Ericsson.
Statistics from the telecommunication regulator, Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK) indicates that the country has close to 10 million mobile money transfer users with Safaricom’s M-Pesa leading with 9.5 million while Zap has 400,000 users.
The country has slightly more than 20 million mobile subscribers.
Mobile money transfer also facilitates daily operations of small businesses and drives economic growth.
Through joint ventures between Sony Ericsson and ST Ericsson, the two companies enable access to new services and enrich individual’s internet, multimedia and user experience through innovations in device design, multimedia platforms, smart mobility and entertainment.
‘Over 100 million of these will come from sub-Saharan Africa. Studies show that soon 80 per cent of all people accessing the internet will be doing so using their mobile device as is already the case in Africa.’
Today, there are 450 million mobile subscriptions in Africa as compared to 10 years ago when there were only about 16 million subscriptions, a figure below the number of phone users in Ghana alone.
In more mature markets, connected devices rather than people, are driving the increase in network traffic.
According to Ericsson’s vision we will reach 50 billion connections by the end of this decade.
The communication landscape is changing rapidly and in Dec ‘09, another milestone was reached when the amount of data traffic carried over mobile networks exceeded the amount of traffic generated from voice calls.
Machine-to-machine communications, or M2M, will be a key component in the future growth of the mobile industry.
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