“Egypt Telecommunications Report Q3 2012” added to ReportBuyer.com

Aug. 2, 2012 - PRLog -- ReportBuyer.com has added a new report http://www.reportbuyer.com/go/BMI08512

Summary of Report  -

H112 was eventful for Egypt's telecoms market, especially the mobile sector. On May 28 2012, French telecoms giant France Télécom completed a EUR1.5bn deal with Egypt's Orascom Telecom Media and Technology (OTMT) and other minority shareholders that increased its stake in the country's second biggest mobile operator Mobinil to 93.9%. OTMT will retain a 5% stake in Mobinil, while the remaining 1.1% will remain on free-float and be traded on the stock exchange. OTMT will, however, retain its 28.75% voting interests in Mobinil to assuage local concerns about national ownership.

Egypt is central to France Télécom's emerging markets strategy and a majority stake in a key service provider in the country will allow the operator to implement its growth strategies amid increasing competition from Vodafone Egypt and Etisalat Misr. In addition to France Télécom's 's increased stake in Mobinil, competition dynamics in the mobile market was also affected by the revision of the metrics for calculating active subscriptions. This saw the country's mobile subscriber base increase by 8.797mn subscribers during Q112. According to market data published by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), the number of mobile subscribers in the country rose from 83.121mn at the end of December 2011 to 91.918mn at the end of March 2012.

We have therefore revised our growth forecast for the mobile market to reflect the regulator's revised data. We expect the market to grow by around 14% in 2012. However, average annual growth for the remainder of our forecast period will slow to 3.5%. This will bring the number of mobile subscriptions in Egypt by 2016 to 107.7mn, equivalent to a penetration of just over 120%. Data from the MCIT show that the decline in fixed-line subscriptions accelerated during the last three quarters of 2011 and continued into Q112 to bring the total number of active lines to 8.57mn at the end of March 2012. Fixed-line incumbent Telecom Egypt, which is the sole provider of fixed-line services in the country, attributed the loss of fixed-line subscribers in 2011 to the tightening of its credit policy on non- payment and the negative effect of the ongoing political crisis on business and tourism activity, while its Q112 results attributed the continued decline of fixed-line subscriptions to fixed-to-mobile substitution. With strong prospects for increased fixed-to-mobile substitution, we forecast a steady decline in fixed-line subscriptions in Egypt over the next five years.

By 2016, we expect fixed-line penetration to fall below 8% from almost 12% in 2010. According to the MCIT, there were 2.83mn USB modem customers at the end of March 2011, up by 59.4% y-o-y. In the last few months, the proliferation of mobile broadband services, including those using USB modems, smartphones and other portable devices, has led to strong subscriber growth within Egypt's broadband sector. Increasingly, mobile broadband services are complementing and competing against broadband services based on ADSL.


Between 2011 and 2016, BMI forecasts that Egypt's broadband sector will grow by approximately 12.4% a year. By 2016 we forecast a total market of about 8.276mn broadband subscribers, a penetration rate of almost 10%. We now exclude mobile data subscriptions via smartphones from our broadband forecasts. This brings our broadband forecast for Egypt in line with our specific definition of mobile broadband subscriptions as those that access internet networks via dedicated USB modems and data cards.

Egypt Telecommunications Report Q3: 2012, is available at:
http://www.reportbuyer.com/telecoms/country_overviews_tel...