Telcos intensify scramble for data, mobile money income
Dar es Salaam. Telecommunication firms have been eying data and mobile money as their major business ideologies and sources of their incomes in 2019.
The Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA) data show mobile money transactions valued at Sh8.317 trillion in June from Sh7.847 trillion as recorded in January, this year.
The increase of transactions was due to a stiff competition among telecom companies that earned millions of shillings in user-fees.
Latest figures from TCRA show there were 43.74 million sim cards in operation by June this year of which 22.95 million were of mobile money subscribers.
At a time the number of voice subscribers went down by 247,497 between March and June 2019, the number of mobile money accounts rose by 201,156 to reach 22.95 million between April and June.
Vodacom’s M-Pesa remained the market leader as of June 2019 in terms of number of accounts and the amount transacted, with at least Sh4.88 trillion transactions, representing 58.7 percent.
It was followed by Tigo Pesa, holding 24.3 percent of the market share with Sh2.02 trillion transactions as of June this year.
Airtel Money stood at the third place as it transacted Sh1.22 trillion, accounting for 14.7 percent of the market share.
Data market
With a change in subscribers’ preferences and the desire to save communication costs, consumers of telecommunication services focused much on data services instead of traditional voice calls.
With a penetration rate of 43 per cent of internet users in 2018, telecommunication firms have been competing on strengthening data services as each of them seeks to win a bigger market share.
The country’s internet users stood at 23.1423 million as of December 2018, TCRA figures show. At 22.28 million, mobile wireless accounted for the lion’s share of subscribers.
With TCRA putting the total number of voice subscribers at 43.749 million as of June 2019, the telecommunication firms see data as one of the income streams that are yet to be fully tapped.
Available statistics show that mobile data, messaging and mobile money are the fastest-growing revenue income streams for telecommunication firms.
For instance, Vodacom’s mobile voice revenue dropped by 1.1 per cent during the year to March 31, 2019 compared to the year to March 31, 2018.
On the contrary, its messaging, data and mobile money revenue streams registered an increase of 31.3, 17.9 and 14.5 per cent respectively.
Vodacom garnered Sh167.016 billion from data during the year that ended on March 31 this year, up from Sh141.61 billion during the year to March 31, 2018.
Apparently, this is why a number of telecommunication firms came up with affordable data-enabled mobile phones during the past weeks.
Tigo Tanzania embarked on an aggressive marketing approach for its Kitochi 4G Smart.
The cheap 4G-enabled phone – complete with the famous Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and Twitter applications - retails at Sh49, 000.
Vodacom Tanzania is doing a similar initiative, aggressively marketing its Smart Kitochi which carries a retail price of Sh48, 000.
Zantel could not remain idle. It announced its cheap data-enabled phone last week. Christened Smarta, the 4G-enabled mobile phone retails at Sh39, 999. The operators have invested massively in 4G infrastructure, enabling to work on hurdles to access, including the price factor of smart handsets.
In its latest Regional Outlook for sub-Saharan Africa which was released a few days ago, GSMA Intelligence puts 4G coverage in Tanzania at 28 percent while adoption of the same is only at five percent.
Voice subscriptions
Three telecom firms, Tigo, Smile and TTCL lost 1.10 million subscribers between January and June 2019, ccording to TCRA. Tigo Network lost the largest number of customer (929,733), followed by Smile (131,342) and TTCL which lost 41,053 customers during the same period. Tigo’s customers decreased from 12.61 million in January to 11.68 million in June this year. But it remained the second biggest company with 26 percent of voice subscription market share.
TCCL takes only 1.6 per cent of the market share with 716,206 customers by June this year and continued to rank sixth among the seven networks in the country.
Generally, mobile subscriptions dropped from 43.83 million in January to 43.75 million in June.
However, the remaining four firms have increased a total of 1.02 million users.
Airtel’s network added a total of 405,308 customers.
Halotel also increased a total of 348,977 of users to 4.2 million subscribers and making it the number four destination in the country (9.4 per cent).
Vodacom’s network continues to lead the market, having 32.9 per cent of the total voice subscription market share.
The network added a total of 236,038 customers and reached a total of 14.39 million mobile users in June this year compared to 14.16 million in January.
TCRA data shows that Zantel’s network added 33,034 customers and reached 1.21 million customers from 1.17 million users in the block. This network is the fifth most populous in the country (2.8 percent).
Bio-metric sim cards registration
In May this year, the government announced new registration rules for sim card, saying the national Identity Cards will be the only legal document for registration of sim cards.
About 58.18 per cent of telecom subscribers will be out of service as the government is persistent with the deadline of switching off the un-registered SIM cards on December 31.
TCRA recently reported that there are 27.38 million SIM cards that are not yet registered out of over 47 million sim cards.
The unregistered sim cards are as follows: Airtel Tanzania (7,185,528), Tigo (6,618, 007), Smile (13,333), (TTCL 825,406), Viattel (3,012,237), Vodacom (9,154,114) and Zantel (573,891)
The number of unregistered Sim cards is higher than that of internet users and mobile money subscribers.
