Cellphone operators in Nigeria are developing ways to bring mobile communications to the country's rural poor, seen as the next big potential market in Africa's most populous nation, executives said on Thursday.
South African firm MTN, sub-Saharan Africa's largest mobile operator, will soon launch a pilot "share phone" programme that allows Nigerians to have their own telephone numbers even if they can't afford a cellphone.
The pilot programme, set to begin in the third quarter, will enable users to have their own personal telephone number through SIM cards, which they can use via a designated community phone. MTN will initially provide 1 000 share phones to rural areas.
"The next wave of growth in subscriber numbers should come from rural areas," Ahmad Farroukh, chief executive officer of MTN Nigeria, told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference in Nigeria's capital Abuja.
Nigeria's mobile phone market has grown from scratch to over 45 million subscribers in seven years, making it one of the fastest-growing in the world.
But Nigeria's penetration rate is just 30%, compared with 76% in the more developed South African market for instance.
MTN Nigeria is the nation's largest mobile operator with 14 million subscribers and a market share of more than 40%. Farroukh said the new target market was Nigerians outside urban centres who earned less than 5 000 naira ($42) a month.
"I think there is still four or five years of growth in Nigeria," he said.
No more scratching?
Nigeria makes up 57% of the West African market and the competition is fierce, said Thecia Mbongue, research analyst for Informa Telecoms and Media.
From Glo's offers of winning a car to Visafone-sponsored beauty pageants, companies are scrambling for every opportunity to grab a bigger share of the lucrative market.
But companies are also under pressure from consumers to provide cheap additional features on cellphones, such as Internet access, music downloads and videogames.
To accomplish this, mobile operators are looking to end the widespread use of pre-paid scratch cards, by far the most common way cellphone users in Africa pay for credit, in favour of electronic vouchers.
Scratch-card sellers, many of them children, have become ubiquitous at major road intersections and street stalls in Abuja, Lagos and cities across West Africa, part of a secondary industry that can involve entire families.
"We are moving out of the scratch cards and aiming to have users reload electronically instead," said Christian De Faria, MTN's executive vice-president for West and Central Africa.
"In the next three years, 3G will be available to all customers, but I don't expect everyone to be using it," he added.
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