Salma El Wardany
MTN’s Sudanese unit was targeting a 50 percent increase in subscribers this year as it seeks to boost revenue to help offset a new government tax, the north African nation’s second-largest cellular operator said last week.
MTN Sudan expected to raise its market share to 35 percent by the end of 2012 from 27 percent last year, chief executive Muhammad Ziaullah Siddiqui said in Khartoum on Friday. The company estimated it would have 9 million subscribers by the end of December and revenue of $5.7 million (R46.3m), compared with $4.4m in September 2011, he said.
“Sudan is a fast-growing market and we look forward to further strengthening our position in the market” by introducing new technologies, Siddiqui said.
Sudan’s cellphone market has grown from 25 000 subscribers at the end of 2000 to 21.6 million people registered with MTN Sudan, Zain Sudan, the country’s biggest operator, and state-owned Sudan Telecom, according to TeleGeography, a Washington-based research group.
Cellphone penetration in the country was about 50 percent in mid-2011, leaving “plenty of room for growth”, TeleGeography said in a report last month.
Under Sudan’s 2012 budget, the country will increase sales and services taxes for telecoms companies to 30 percent from 20 percent, while a tax on profit will be raised to 30 percent from 15 percent, to compensate for the revenue the government lost when oil-rich South Sudan declared independence in July.
“The new tax rise will definitely reduce revenue for us and reduce services available for customers, but I think we can still absorb it,” Siddiqui said.
After South Sudan’s secession following a peace agreement in 2005 that ended a two-decade war between the north and south, MTN Sudan had to reconfigure its Sudanese network in the south to be a separate operating entity. Since December, the operations of the telecom company in the new country are housed under MTN South Sudan. Before independence, southerners accounted for 20 percent of subscribers.
“The secession hasn’t affected us significantly, because the number of subscribers in the north has been growing non-stop,” Siddiqui said. – Bloomberg