African data use ‘to carry on surging’
A man in Lagos pushes his cart past a billboard advertising Airtel Africa, Nigeria's third-biggest cellular operator. The unit of Indian wireless service provider Bharti Airtel says data usage has doubled in a year in the 17 African countries in which it operates. File photo: AP A man in Lagos pushes his cart past a billboard advertising Airtel Africa, Nigeria's third-biggest cellular operator. The unit of Indian wireless service provider Bharti Airtel says data usage has doubled in a year in the 17 African countries in which it operates. File photo: AP
Nairobi - Data usage in Africa will continue to accelerate after more than doubling in the year to June, according to Indian cellular network operator Bharti Airtel, which has operations in 17 countries on the continent.
“We do not expect this rate of growth to show any significant change in the short to medium term,” Andre Beyers, the chief marketing officer of Nairobi-based Airtel Africa, said on August 23 in response to e-mailed questions.
“If anything, with the further increase in smartphone penetration, our continuous expanding coverage and some more exciting products, this growth rate might improve.”
Cellphone users in urban Africa are increasingly using data because of falling prices of internet-enabled handsets, according to research by McKinsey. About 25 percent of smartphone owners in Africa accessed the internet daily and more than half did so at least once a month, the research company said.
“We have seen tremendous growth in most of our markets, but the growth in… Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Burkina Faso is really pleasing,” Beyers said. “Our efforts to increase the access to, and affordability of, data [are] showing good returns.”
Airtel’s African data subscriber numbers jumped 65 percent during the 12-month period to 15 million customers, Beyers said.
Data use advanced about 150 percent. Revenue from data services made up more than 5 percent of the African unit’s total sales for the first time, he said.
As part of plans to meet its customers’ growing demand for data services, Airtel Africa has been deploying high-speed internet capacity across its African network.
Beyers said that so far 14 out of the 17 nations had access speeds of as much as 42 megabits a second.
Airtel Africa is the third-biggest operator in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with 21.6 million customers in June, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission. That compared with 18.6 million in April 2012.
The company is Kenya’s second-largest operator, trailing only Safaricom, a unit of Britain’s Vodafone.
Bharti Airtel, which started operating in Africa in 2010, made a net loss of $106 million (R1.1 billion) on the continent in the three months to June, compared with a loss of $124m in the same period a year earlier, the company said on July 31.
Sales declined for the second consecutive quarter.
Airtel plans to reverse the trend by targeting the growing number of smartphone users in Africa to boost revenue per user and reduce dependence on traditional fixed-line services.
Bharti Airtel is India’s biggest cellphone company with more than 269 million customers across 20 countries in Asia and Africa, according to its website. – Bloomberg