Gearing Up for AfricaCom in Cape Town

On 9 November, the 14^th annual AfricaCom event kicks off in Cape Town, with the organisers expecting a record attendance, which they are predicting to be 12.5% higher than last year.

While I’m sure that the scenery and activities of Cape Town draw attendees, it is also certainly a reflection of the silver lining that Africa is to the economic cloud that hangs over many developed markets. For anybody in the telecoms industry, relatively high subscriber growth and low mobile penetration create compelling reasons to be doing business in Africa.

But, of course, Africa also has its fair share of challenges, most of which boil down to one thing: how to ensure profitability in highly competitive, price sensitive and sparsely populated markets. Most of the focus so far has been on controlling costs to enable pricing competitiveness—lean operations being something that the Comptel Dynamic OSS portfolio supports very well.

But this is only half the equation against a backdrop of high churn in Africa. As is generally recognised, it is almost always more expensive to acquire new subscribers than to keep them. Ultimately, African telecoms are entering a new battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of their subscribers in a quest to create a ‘stickiness’ for their hard won subscribers.

So it is encouraging to see that the tagline for AfricaCom this year, “Advancing Innovation & Profitability for a Digital Africa,” is recognising this key link between innovation and profitability.

Please do come and visit Comptel at Stand F5 at AfricaCom this week to discuss how we can help operators win the ‘hearts and minds’ of their customers through innovative OSS solutions.

Gearing Up for AfricaCom in Cape Town, 9-11 November

In less than a week’s time, AfricaCom (taking place 9-11 November) kicks off in Cape Town, South Africa, and Comptel will be there at stand D9 (opposite the coffee point!).

The organizers, Informa, are claiming that this year a record 4,200+ attendees from more than 1,500+ companies have registered—up 70% from last year.

From a biased perspective, I would like to think that holding this event in beautiful Cape Town (which IS Nice!), has something to do with this increase, but in reality, I suspect it is more a reflection of the rapid growth of the telecoms sector in Africa.

The temptation is to say growth = money for events…but I believe this cynically oversimplifies the value operators get from an event like this.

Growth has also meant increasing competition with everybody wanting a slice of the pie, so I suspect operators are primarily attending to find answers about how to generate and manage new revenue streams and cut costs in order to ensure future growth.

African operators need to grow their revenues from services (e.g. data and VAS) in the face of declining voice and SMS margins. For operators with OSS heavily geared towards simple voice and SMS services, an increasingly complex service portfolio brings many new challenges with respect to designing, launching and managing them. Comptel has seen a lot of interest this year from African operators in its catalog solutions for helping them get new services to market more quickly and cheaply, and managing the increasing service complexity.

There is also a non-growth-related challenge that needs mentioning, and that is one introduced by the legislation being enacted across Africa requiring operators to identify subscribers prior to their SIMs being activated. This shatters the current operating model of simply bulk pre-provisioning SIMs and introduces the challenge of only activating them after subscribers have been identified. It also presents operators with the ‘opportunity’ to leverage a closer relationship with what was previously a largely ‘anonymous’ subscriber base using ‘one-size-fits-all’ packages. Comptel has also seen a lot of interest in its dynamic SIM management solution, which helps operators comply with the legislation, cut costs from SIM wastage and leverage the legislation to actually get additional revenue streams.

So here’s to problem-solving at AfricaCom. Hope to see you ‘here’.