The Zain-Bharti transaction: How will West African mobile markets be affected?
Mais non! DevelopingTelecomsWatch has not become a francophone blog. The frenchified title of today's offering is in honour of the fact that a noted West African telecoms conference is, after two years in Nigeria, to be hosted in Senegal in June.
Geopolitically, West Africa is defined by the UN as consisting of: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. Of these, just four are countries where English is an official language. Of the others, two are Lusophone states and ten are French-speaking.
The organisers of the aforementioned conference have found that this linguistic diversity in the region creates certain challenges for them. Nigeria, as by far the largest market in West Africa, seemed to be the logical place in which to host the event for the last couple of years. Certainly, relocating the conference to Abuja (from its previous venue of Dakar, Senegal) two years ago paid tremendous dividends in terms of boosted attendance numbers and a good buzz of activity at the 2008 and 2009 iterations of the gathering. This was achieved, however, at the cost of making the event a tad less attractive for delegates from the numerous French-speaking markets. This effect was somewhat mitigated by ensuring that simultaneous English-French translation was available during all conference sessions, but perhaps not as much as was hoped given that this year Informa Telecoms & Media have moved the show back to Dakar again.
Given that delegates from telecoms operators attend for free, Informa monetises its Com World Series events (of which West & Central Africa Com is one) largely by selling sponsorship packages and exhibition space to the telecoms technology vendors that do business with those operators. These vendors will doubtless remain keen on the potential of the large (and fragmented) Nigerian telecoms market and might be concerned about not having a good tradeshow route-to-market to address this now the conference has headed back to Dakar.
With this in mind, I guess, Informa are also running a specifically Nigerian event in Lagos this year. This will make its debut in September.
In the meantime, what can we expect to be discussed at the Dakar gathering?
I guess one hot topic - addressed via offline chitchat if not via presentations and panel discussions - will be the effect of Zain's withdrawal from the region. The Kuwaiti group currently controls opcos in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria and Sierra Leone - as well as others in markets elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. As discussed ad nauseum in DTW posts passim., all of these are now set to be in the hands of giant Indian cellco Bharti Airtel. DTW's most recent article, mainly a brief exploration of whether India's mobile market is set to consolidate, did a little to talk up the ways in which Bharti Airtel might be able to reinvent Zain Africa by introducing the low-cost business model which it has empoyed on home turf. So let's see how much tougher sub-Saharan markets are set to become for Zain/Bharti's competitors.
This acquistion, however, may yet take a little while longer to conclude. One reason for this could be resistance from the governments of the countries in which the Zain-owned opcos are set to change hands. That said, there have been recent signs of these obstacles being overcome.
Back in March, for example, as reported by India's Economic Times, the Government of Gabon said it "disapproves" of the sale of Zain's Gabonese assets to Bharti Airtel and reserves the right to take "all necessary measures". Late last week, Reuters was reporting that this objection had been resolved.
It will be interesting, then, to see how long it takes to deal with any further problems of this kind. If the difficulties do continue into June, it should be interesting to connect with Tiemoko Coulibaly, Vice President of Zain's Western Africa operations at West & Central Africa Com in Dakar.
There will be many other reasons to attend the event - but connecting with the likes of Mr Coulibaly could be motivation enough for anyone who does business with Zain in Africa and now needs to keep on top of how the change of ownership is set to change the game.
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