Nigeria continues to maintain its position as Africa’s largest mobile market with investments now at US$25 billion in the telecommunications sector.
Dr. Eugene Juwah, NCC’s executive vice-chairman, said this while speaking on Nigeria’s preparation to attend the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference to be held in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in October this year.
Dr. Juwah added that back in 2009, investment in the same sector stood at US$ 18 billion.
Nigeria has already booked a pavilion at the ITU conference, and will use this chance to make presentations on the investment opportunities available in the West African country, in a bid to boost foreign investment.
With a population of close to 160 million people, Nigeria has over 100 million mobile phone subscribers, a 60 percent mobile penetration. Internet penetration in the country stands at 45 million users representing 29 percent of the population, according to InternetWorldStats.com’s 2011 estimations.
Research by www.budde.com indicate that much of the remaining addressable market in Nigeria is in the country’s rural areas, where network rollouts and operations are expensive.
Voice revenue has also declined, and is no longer the largest contributor of revenue to mobile operators. It is for this reason, that operators are developing new revenue streams from services such as third generation (3G) mobile broadband, mobile payments/banking, and others.
Fibre-optic cables are also being rolled out in the country, and two operators are already rolling out fourth generations (4G) LTE networks to deal with the ever increasing need for bandwidth in the country.
