Nigeria, S’Africa raise MEA mobile operators’ revenue growth by 2.7%

MOBILE operators service revenue rose in Q3 2015, albeit up only 0.1 per cent globally, after sliding fortunes for four quarters.

According to Strategy Analytics, China provided the overall boost to global numbers, but other regions such as Europe also saw improving trends with uplift from greater 4G LTE adoption.

The report said operators in Africa and Middle East recorded the highest growth in Q3 at 2.7 per cent, boosted in particular by strong data and voice performance in South Africa and subscriptions from Nigeria.

These findings are based on data from Strategy Analytics’ Wireless Operator Performance Benchmarking database, which tracks the financial and operational performance of 246 active wireless operators, which collectively account for 80 per cent of the world’s cellular subscriptions.

Other findings of the report include that Central and Latin America recorded the biggest revenue declines in Q3, down 6.9 per cent year on year. Venezuela’s rapidly deteriorating exchange rate contributed to most of this decline, with the rest of the region down just 0.2 per cent; global mobile data traffic increased 71 per cent year on year in Q3 2015, with non-SMS data accounting for 43 per cent of service revenue.

Executive Director, Wireless Operator Strategies, Phil Kendall, said: “4G remains an important catalyst for revenue growth and recovery in the mobile market. Delivering a better network experience on increasingly larger-display devices, operators are seeing good data traffic and revenue growth trends enabled by 4G.”

To the Director, Wireless Operator Strategies, Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, it is concerning for operators in developing 4G markets that leading markets such as Japan and South Korea are starting to see service revenue fall, reflecting the challenges of pushing 4G ARPU uplift right through into the mass market.

“Greater stability in the US supports our view that shared data plans are an important tool for value creation in this next phase of the 4G market’s evolution”, she stated.