Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) has declared MTN Ghana as a significant market power and will begin to implement specific policies to ensure a level playing field for all telecom service providers in the country.
With 23.9 million voice subscriptions, MTN Ghana controls 57% of the subscriber market share in Ghana, far ahead of Vodafone, AirtelTigo, and Glo at 21.97%, 20.3%, and 1.75% respectively.
Despite the presence of 52 Internet service providers and 3 other telcos, MTN enjoys 67% of the country’s data market and currently leads the country’s fast-growing mobile money sector.
NCA states policies will be put in place to ensure competition and more investments in the country’s telecom sector.
Some of these measures will include a favourable connection rate for disadvantaged operators, the setting of floor and ceiling pricing on all voice, data, text messages and mobile money subscriptions. It will also ensure that the various operator vendors are not subject to exclusionary pricing or behaviour.
Though MTN Ghana claims that it has yet to receive an official notice, once these measures are implemented, prices of data and voice might slightly increase across all telcos. The cost of MTN Ghana’s dominance
Competition is key to the growth of any sector, but the telecom sectors of most African countries are mostly characterised by a lack of competition and the dominance of one or two telecom service providers in voice, data, and even mobile money services.
Notable examples can be found in Kenya where Safaricom controls a 64% telecom market share; Niger where Airtel controls 45%; and Rwanda, where AirtelTigo (merger) and MTN have a duopoly of the telecom sector.
According to a broadband affordability report by the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), the severe lack of competition across Africa contributes to the high cost of data — one gigabyte costs 7.12% of the average monthly income instead of the standard 2% average.
Over the years, Ghana’s telecom sector has not been competitive. State-run Ghana Telecom and its subsidiaries (all acquired by Vodafone) ran a monopoly until the arrival of Scancom (now MTN) that began to dominate its competition seven years later.
MTN’s acquisition of Scancom in 2007 appeared to push the telco’s dominance even further. The telecom giant already had a 52% market share of Ghana’s telecom subscribers as of 2009, and it has grown by only 5% since then (57% as of 2020).In 2013 , the service provider of the country’s Internet subscribers, and that […]
