Ben Uzor Jr
Etisalat Nigeria says its strategic target for the new business year is to further narrow the gap between the firm and, Airtel, the third biggest operating company in Nigeria’s telecoms market. The telecoms company intends to reach over 15 million subscribers by the end of 2012, to achieve this feat. As at December 2011, official subscriber statistics from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), nation’s telecoms regulator showed that MTN Nigeria had 41.6 million subscribers, while Globacom had 19.8 million; Airtel had 18.0 million and Etisalat Nigeria had 10.7 million, in the voice segment.
Steve Evans, chief executive officer, Etisalat Nigeria who made this revelation in an interview with Business Day at the recently concluded GSMA Mobile World Congress, said the telecoms company was well positioned to meet this target, pointing out that by the end of 2011, Etisalat Nigeria grew its subscriber numbers from 6.8 million to 10.8 million. “This year, we are targeting to take our subscriber base by the end of 2012 to over 15 million. We plan to add at least another four million net subscribers so that we would be well over 15 million. I think at that point, we are going to be quite close to been the number three telecoms operator in Nigeria’s competitive market. That’s our challenge for this year.
“We intend to grow our customer base while continuing obviously to grow the revenue per user at the same time. We have to be innovative. “We have to keep churning out interesting services to our customers and we have to ensure that the quality of network is of the highest standard”, he said. Analysts strongly believe the commencement of the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) scheme in October will be the game changer for Etisalat, a late entrant in Nigeria’s telecoms market. MNP scheme is expected to allow Nigeria’s over 90 million mobile telephone users to retain their numbers when changing from one mobile network operator to another.
“We need to promote mobile number portability because it is the only way that you create a more open market. Otherwise, the early entrants will have an advantage because they have mobile numbers which they gave to people 10 years ago and it is very difficult for people to change those number. If you look at measures which the regulator can take to enhance competition, number portability is very important”, Evans posited. In his reaction, Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman (EVC), Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) pointed out that MNP scheme was already on-going in the country.
“We have issued a license and we are expecting that come October number portability will be available in Nigeria. With this, if for instance an MTN customer is not satisfied with the quality of service they can switch to Etisalat and still retain their phone number. This is what Nigerians have been yearning for and it is my objective to make this scheme available to them by October”, Juwah said in an interview with Business Day recently. According to him, a combined registration of 110,433,976 SIM cards has been registered and the data is going through processing and cleaning at the moment.
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