By the end of 2008, there were 11.745mn mobile subscribers in Sudan at the end of 2008, giving apenetration rate of just over 30%. It is a country with exceptionally good growth potential, although newgrowth is inevitably going to put pressure on ARPUs. This is often the case as further expansion in thesubscriber base means growing further into the bottom end of the market, capturing ever lower spendingcustomers.
Sudan’s mobile operators are, however, whole heartedly pursuing this further growth, and withinvestments in expanding networks, a wave of expansion is taking place into rural regions, and thepreviously underserved, now semi-autonomous South. As well as being expanded into by Zain and morerecently MTN, since January 2009, South Sudan has its own dedicated mobile operator. No results are yetavailable from Vivacell, but BMI hopes to include them in our next update.
Q308 had seen a worrying slowdown in mobile growth in Sudan, but BMI is happy to find that Q408results have shown a fairly dramatic reversal of this trend, and we anticipate that 2009 will have an evenhigher growth rate than 2008.
Value-added services are not very well developed in Sudan. There is some 3G available, though thequality of service is apparently very limited, and in some cases restricted only to the postpaid subscriberbase, which is minimal. MTN has hinted at some more investment in its 3G facilities in its end of year2008 statement, but details are not available. There is some good potential for the operators to developVAS, concentrating on the more developed areas and around Khartoum and elsewhere. This could help tocounterbalance the move towards the lower end of the market in the growing subscriber base.
Fixed-line services remain something of a mystery, since there is no reliable information from either theoperators or the regulator. Suffice to say that fixed-line services, even fixed wireless, are not verywidespread. Internet service is even less common; broadband in particular had only an estimated 65,000subscribers at the end of 2008. However, the country does claim 4mn internet users, so it would appearthat the vast majority of people are making use of public facilities. This bodes well for future demand forinternet services, but we do not expect broadband to become a widespread service for some years tocome, with the cost remaining prohibitively high for most people.
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