Ghana Telecommunications Report Q4 2009

BMI maintains its forecasts relating to Ghana's mobile market, and we fully expect to see the country's mobile penetration reach 60% before the end of 2009. This will mean that it ends the year with close to 15mn mobile subscribers, which indicates a 27% expansion of the subscriber base during 2009. This is down from 57% in 2008, but this is very much a natural evolution thanks to a gradually maturing mobile market.

More worrying are Ghana's ARPUs, which took something of a dive in Q109. This is a pattern that has been seen in many markets across Africa, exemplified by pan-African operator MTN's results. MTN's Q109 abridged results release shows that in every single one of the markets it operates in, ARPUs have gone down, some of them really dramatically. A certain amount of this decrease is down to devalued currencies against the dollar, and the rest is due to decreased spending on the home market. In Ghana's case, MTN's blended ARPU fell from US$12 in Q408 to US$8 in Q108. This 31% drop in US dollar terms, however, was backed up by a 15% drop in local currency terms, so there is evidence that mobile spending did noticeably drop as people started to feel the effects of economic concerns. BMI is hopeful that, in the next couple of quarters, operators, including MTN, will get more of a handle on ARPUs.

The operators are hoping that 2009 will see 3G take off in Ghana. At the very end of 2008, Zain launched as the fifth operator on the market. It launched as a 2G and 3G operator, making it the first to offer 3G services in the country. It only managed this by a whisker, however, as market leader MTN launched its own 3G network soon afterwards. Coverage of the new services remains fairly minimal, but the operators are working at expanding it, and Vodafone has contracted Huawei to upgrade its own network. 3G could help boost uptake of internet services in Ghana and will hopefully give the operators a fresh revenue stream, which may be helpful as the increasing levels of competition put some pressure on their ARPUs.

April 2008 was the month that Vodafone chose to rebrand One Touch and Ghana Telecom as Vodafone.

BMI did wonder if it would wait until its own 3G launch in order to have a big occasion as a launch pad for the new brand. The decision to push ahead with an earlier rebranding suggests that Vodafone feels it has overcome a lot of the negative press that surrounded its purchase of Ghana Telecom, although there are still some inquiries going on into the details of the deal.

Ghana's fixed-line market is looking fairly healthy, as African fixed-line markets go. Penetration is close to 2%, and Vodafone is apparently investing in extending the Ghana Telecom network. At the same time, the National Communications Authority (NCA) is in the process of issuing national and zonal fixedwireless licences, in an effort to promote competition in the fixed-line sector and reinvigorate the market.

In December 2008 the Main One cable company received landing rights to connect its undersea cable to increasing the bandwidth of hungry Ghana. Internet use has been quite slow to take off, and cheaper international bandwidth will certainly be beneficial. However, it may have a more dramatic impact on other areas of the telecoms industry, since all carriers have to pay, one way or another, for international connectivity, and reductions in costs could lead to lower prices, which are often lamented as being too high.