The Ghana Telecommunications Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, telecommunication associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Ghana's telecommunications industry.
BMI's latest update on Ghana's telecommunications market contains revised forecast figures for the country's mobile telephony and fixed-line markets. BMI's new mobile forecast includes September 2010 data as published by Ghana's leading mobile network operators, including MTN Ghana, part of South Africa's MTN Group, and Tigo Ghana, owned by Luxembourg's Millicom International Cellular. In the first nine months of 2010, BMI calculate that the number of mobile subscribers increased by 5.8%, to reach 16.238mn. This revealed a slowdown compared to the first six months of 2010, which saw a rise of 7.3%, and was due to the net losses reported in Q310 as a result of SIM registration, which was introduced on July 1 2010. There were 237,000 net losses in the quarter. For the year as a whole, BMI now predict that the market will expand by 5%. This will raise the penetration rate to just over 66% by the end of 2010.
Despite BMI's reservations that there will be slower growth in 2010, MTN, Zain Ghana and Vodafone have all heavily reduced their prepaid tariffs, which should lead to stronger customer growth. While both Zain and Vodafone already offered the market's lowest tariffs at GHS8 per minute, MTN announced at the end of October 2010 that it was cutting its prepaid tariff in half to undercut the competition and offer it at GHS7 per minute. Furthermore, it is expected that Glo Mobile Ghana will launch mobile services before the end of the year.
