{"id":6009,"date":"2013-12-06T05:47:50","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T10:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/?p=6009"},"modified":"2013-12-06T05:47:50","modified_gmt":"2013-12-06T10:47:50","slug":"vodacom-seeks-entry-into-ethiopias-telecom-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/6009","title":{"rendered":"Vodacom Seeks Entry into Ethiopia\u2019s Telecom Sector"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vodacom<\/a>South Africa\u2019s Vodacom Group has opened its first office in Ethiopia in an attempt to establish its presence in the country.<\/p>\n

The company, which has a strong presence in several African countries including Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, DRC, Nigeria, and of course South Africa, has described Ethiopia as the \u201cmost fantastic telecoms market on the continent.\u201d<\/p>\n

“We would invest here tomorrow\u2026 One operator, 80 million people, the economy growing at 7% – it’s a great market,”\u00a0Vodacom Group chief executive officer, Romeo Kumalo told Reuters.<\/p>\n

The Telecoms firm says it will soon apply for a license to offer value-added services – all other services aside from standard voice calls. This is seen as an attempt to position itself in anticipation of the government’s opening of the country\u2019s telecommunications sector to private investors.<\/p>\n

More than 200 Telecoms companies have applied for similar licenses from Ethiopia\u2019s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, but only MTN group has been granted the authority to offer value-added services. But MTN is yet to set up shop in the country.<\/p>\n

Ethiopia\u2019s state-run Ethio Telecom continues to maintain a monopoly in telecoms and refuses to liberalize the sector saying\u00a0the USD 321 million generated by the company every year is used to finance infrastructure projects. Foreign investors continue to show great interest in the sector, which Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has described as a \u201ccash cow\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ethio Telecom recently made deals with Huawei and ZTE to expand the mobile phone infrastructure throughout the country.\u00a0The two deals will see the introduction of a 4G network in Addis Ababa and expansion of mobile phone and 3G internet access throughout the rest of the country.<\/p>\n

Growth in Ethiopia\u2019s Telecoms sector is indicative of the entire continent, which has seen tremendous growth in recent years with subscribers increasing significantly between 2011 and 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Africa\u2019s Vodacom Group has opened its first office in Ethiopia in an attempt to establish its presence in the country. The company, which has a strong presence in several African countries including Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, DRC, Nigeria, and of…<\/span> Read more ›<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[44],"tags":[451,4967,452],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6009"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}