Africa’s mobile internet market has grown steadily over the last decade
and new forecasts show mobile data revenue, will double over the five
years to 2019—topping $22 billion.
On the other hand, mobile voice revenue, though still significantly
higher ($50 billion in 2014), will only grow by 10% in the same period.
It means the continent’s telecoms operators will likely intensify
efforts to grab more mobile data market share in coming months.
In Nigeria, the continent’s biggest mobile
market, the race for more mobile internet users has already kicked off
with a shift in telco marketing strategies away from voice minutes to
data package offers. And with this has come a sharp drop in mobile data
prices.
Nigeria’s internet usage numbers has grown rapidly in the last few years and is now pegged at 92 million, down by a few million owing to a recent sim card registration exercise that cut off unregistered users due to security concerns.
Over the course of the last month, the country’s leading mobile
operators have announced cuts in mobile data prices. The price cuts were
primarily made possible by the deregulation of the data prices by the
Nigerian Communications Commission last October when the regulator
announced a removal of a data floor price, leaving telcos to set prices as low as possible.
