Revenue growth is a key issue even in the fastest-growing mobile markets globally, a new report by GSMA points out. Sub-Saharan Africa is growing at a compound annual growth rate of of 6.1 percent to 2020, about 50 percent faster than the global average.
But revenue growth is not keeping pace, expanding only about two percent per year.
Total mobile revenues in Sub-Saharan Africa reached $40 billion in 2016, an increase of 3.9 percent, year over year.
But revenue growth has been trending downwards, driven in part by economic weakness.
But revenue growth will “remain subdued for the remainder of this decade due to the increasing cannibalization of traditional voice and messaging revenues as subscribers shift to alternative platforms,” says GSMA.
As in other markets, messaging substitutes are widely used and are one reason voice and carrier messaging revenues are dropping.
With traditional voice and messaging services accounting for more than 70 percent of service revenues for many operators in the region, revenue growth from additional subscriptions and mobile internet will be countered by declining legacy revenues.
At the end of 2016, there were 420 million unique mobile subscribers in the region, which will have more than half a billion unique mobile subscribers by 2020, by which time around half the population will subscribe to a mobile service.
The total number of subscriber identity modules in use in the region reached 731 million at the end of 2016, and will rise to nearly one billion by 2020.
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