Sunday, December 17, 2006
Room for Growth in Saudi Cellular Market
| audi Tech Tracker Arab News |
According to a report, “Saudi Arabia Cellular Users Survey 2006” released this week by the Arab Advisors Group, 20.3 percent of Saudi Arabia’s cellular subscribers reported using both Al-Jawwal and Mobily’s networks. Arab Advisors Group carried out a major survey of cellular users in Saudi Arabia that gave insights into the usage habits of the Arab world’s largest cellular market by subscriber base and by revenues. The survey involved face-to-face interviews with 674 respondents from different households in Makkah, Jeddah, Madinah, Riyadh, Dammam and Dhahran, selected randomly in a manner proportionate to the estimated population size of the different areas. Respondents were 15 years old and above and were cellular service users. This random survey focused on the current cellular users in Saudi Arabia, and not the total population of the country. Saudi Arabia’s GSM penetration stood at 60.5 percent by end of 2005. The Arab Advisors survey revealed that 39.6 percent of cellular users have more than one line and that sourcing from more than one operator is common. The need for separate business and personal lines was the main reason for having more than one line (53.9 percent of those with more than one cellular line). Cost savings was a reason for 22.8 percent of respondents with more than one mobile line. On the media front, newspaper ads, TV ads and word of mouth were cited as the three most effective ways that affected the cellular users choice of operators and plans. “The survey revealed a substantial overlap of subscribers in the market between Al-Jawwal and Mobily networks. This may indicate that the actual penetration rate in the country is lower than what the reported numbers of both operators indicate: A good one-fifth of individual subscribers are subscribers of both operators, and that over 39 percent have multiple mobile lines. This trend seems to stem from the ongoing promotions in the Saudi market that include free credit, no connection fees and lengthy validity periods for prepaid numbers. This means that Saudi Arabia’s cellular penetration rate by Q3 2006 (strictly defined as number of individuals using the mobile service) is possibly around the 60 percent mark rather than the 74.5 percent number indicated by the reported subscriber numbers of the two operators. This is certainly good news for all operators as it points to the growth potential of the market,” commented Jawad Abbassi, Arab Advisors Group’s founder and general manager. ITF Invests in Atos Origin Injazat Technology Fund (ITF), the first Islamic venture capital firm in the MENA region, has acquired 19 percent stake in Atos Origin Middle East (AOME), a leading international information technology services provider as part of a recently structured management buyout (MBO). Injazat Technology Fund is a $50 million private equity fund that operates in compliance with Shariah principles and targets technology companies in the region. AOME offers a full range of IT services from system design and integration to managing outsourced IT operations. Covering 19 countries, with more than 500 personnel and dedicated to over 50 large projects throughout the Middle East, AOME is the largest Consulting and Integration Partner in the region. “This strategic investment in Atos Origin Middle East reinforces our commitment toward the development of the region’s information technology industry. We have been working with AOME management for sometime to complete one of the region’s first technology MBOs. In addition to AOME’s strong market presence and great potential it provides a high degree of synergy with other ITF portfolio companies, both at the geographic and product level” said Rami Bazzi, principal, Injazat Technology Fund. Ferras Zalt, CEO, Atos Origin Middle East, added, “Injazat Technology Fund’s stake in AOME is bound to consolidate our standing in the regional IT industry. We see this as an opportunity to increase our contribution to developing the IT resources in the region while also enhancing the service delivery to our clients. Injazat’s support will ensure that our business has the required financial backing, and we can also benefit from the resources of Injazat’s high-profile constituent companies.” AOME has two main lines of service — Consulting and Systems Integration (CSI) and Managed Operations (MO). CSI includes integrating new solutions as well as maximizing returns from existing IT investment. MO provides outsourcing operations to clients to manage their core IT infrastructures, including data centers, desktop support, server farms and network communication systems. AOME has handled SAP projects for some of the largest organizations and ministries in the Middle East. Analysis of New License Potential In October 2006, Saudi Arabia’s telecom regulator, the CITC, announced auctions for new fixed and mobile licenses in the Kingdom, with applications due at the end of January 2007. The CITC intends to award one more mobile license and one or more fixed licenses in March 2007. “The license is very attractive to say the least; if we recall that Saudi Arabia is a sizable under-penetrated telecoms market in the Middle East,” noted Pyramid Research Analyst Dearbhla McHenry. “At YE2005, fixed penetration stood at about 16 percent with broadband penetration well below 0.5 percent. Meanwhile, on the mobile side, the performance was even less acceptable, given income levels.” According to Pyramid Research, upon the entry of these upcoming new operators, Saudi Arabia will have the most liberalized telecom market in the Gulf, with four mobile operators and at least two fixed service providers. Based on the effective way the regulator handled the entrance of second mobile operator, Mobily, in 2005, it is Pyramid Research’s view that the CITC is likely to enforce a relatively fair playing field for the newcomers, although political considerations will probably play some part in the awarding of the licenses. Pyramid’s believes that while operators who can acquire both a fixed and a mobile license will have a significant competitive advantage overall, the auction also presents a valuable opportunity for smaller players who can roll out a broadband network quickly and cheaply using new technologies such as WiMAX. The new mobile entrant must cover the Kingdom’s seven major cities by the end of its first year, and cover 85 percent of the entire population within five years. The new fixed service providers, however, are only required to cover 10 percent of the population in three districts within five years (not including customers covered via local loop unbundling), because the CITC has not predetermined the number of licenses to be granted. Applicants who plan to offer Fixed Wireless Broadband may bid for spectrum along with their wireline application, and the CITC will award fixed WiMAX licenses to up to four different operators in each province. |
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Jordan Times: Information Minister "Formally Inaugurated" E- Government Project
Text of report by Hugh Naylor, "Ministry launches e-government project, published in English by Jordan Times website on 20 November
The government formally inaugurated its long-awaited e- government programme yesterday with the intention of streamlining bureaucracy and enhancing access to the internet in rural areas.
In front of an audience at the Royal Scientific Society, Minister of Information and Communications Technology Omar Kurdi said the e- government website would eventually act as a one-stop gateway to the government.
"We will soon be able to provide citizens and businesses will all government-related information without having to switch from one website to another."
The programme, which is slated to cost JD45m until its scheduled completion in 2009, seeks to improve communication between ministries, citizens and businesses by offering internet browsers quick access to information.
"People won't have to go to two or three ministries in a single day to get their passports renewed - they can just go online, fill out a form, and the ministries will do the rest. E-government will be citizen-centric and will save all of us time and money," he said.
"At the end of the day," explained Kurdi, "we're looking for e- government to act as a mechanism for public sector reform."
The ministry is pushing for e-government to serve as a tool to expand greater internet access to rural communities. As part of the ambitious programme, the ministry plans to install 5,000km of fibre optic cables, expand broadband internet access to 3,200 public schools, 23 community colleges and roughly 120 internet knowledge stations by the end of this year.
Hasan Hourani, director of the e-government programme, said the ministry has begun training 8,000 government employees and managers of the country's knowledge stations in how to navigate the e- government project's website.
"Internet technology has only modestly penetrated Jordan," he told The Jordan Times, "but our training courses and programmes will help change mindsets and get more people familiar with this technology."
Internet penetration in Jordan currently stands at around 7.5 per cent out of which three per cent are paying subscribers.
But trimming down bureaucracy and increasing greater internet usage, according to observers, will require more than just a transition to a stronger reliance on internet technology. "There is no substitute for good management," said economist Yusuf Mansour, adding that dependence on internet technology alone won't fix deeper structural problems in the government. "Changing the country's mindset is the most important thing - not hardware and software. This can be done with good and consistent management," he said. "But there is a need for the government to push for information technology adoption," he added.
Mansour also said that a constant reshuffling of cabinets and changes in ministerial posts could derail the e-government's management progress, setting back its full implementation.
Mohammad Masri of the University of Jordan's Centre for Strategic Studies, however, said there are serious flaws in the way the ministry went about preparing Jordan for its impending transition to e-government.
"If you ask people in the street about it, they simply don't know what e-government is," he said. "The government should have had a better strategy that informed and prepared people of the programme, which would have made it more effective from the start."
He commented that the ministry should have implemented a gradual, grass-roots and community-based approach to further awareness of information technology to rural areas.
"People in rural areas are used to seeing their documents and papers stamped in front of them. Making transactions over the internet is a completely foreign concept for them, and changing their ideas will take a lot of work."
If internet penetration doesn't proceed fast enough, Masri said he believed "e-government could become just a tool of elites."
But Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at the University of Jordan, believes that if Jordan wants to enter the information technology age, a considerable effort must be made by the government. "How do you become an internet culture without rapidly promoting internet technology?" he said. "Jordan has a lot of potential to develop an internet culture."
Shteiwi said, however, that the government must be committed to keep positive momentum going. "It would be a waste if they [the government] got sidetracked; they must continue promoting these changes in a progressive way."
Friday, December 08, 2006
The Economist on Mobile telecoms in Africa
The five big operators are MTN of South Africa, MTC of Kuwait, Egypt's Orascom, Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Vodacom, an Anglo-South African firm. John Tiefel, a partner at McKinsey, predicts that consolidation will result in three or four large operators spanning Africa and the Middle East, with a sprinkling of national firms. “All the operators have a very similar vision: to become meaningful players in all these markets,” says Phuthuma Nhleko, the boss of MTN Group in South Africa, which has operations in 21 countries across the region.
The appeal is obvious. “There is high growth, high profitability, high cashflow generation and still many years of growth ahead of us,” says Marc Beuls, president of Millicom International Cellular, which does business in 17 developing countries under the name Tigo. Mobile telephony is now a $25 billion industry across Africa and the Middle East. Subscriber growth in the region will be 40% this year and exceeds 100% in some countries. Revenue is increasing by 20-50% annually and margins are around 40%. In many countries mobile operators are among the biggest companies and largest taxpayers. And the market is still young: fewer than 15% of Africans have mobile phones.
The companies benefiting from this growth are mainly home-grown. As Western operators either stayed away or pulled out after the telecoms crash of 2001, African firms raced to expand. More recently Middle Eastern operators have moved into the market on a tide of petrodollars. As for European firms, only Millicom of Luxembourg and Vodacom, a joint-venture between Vodafone of Britain and Telkom of South Africa, have much of a presence. “We have more appetite for risky countries and go in there and run very profitable businesses,” says Tito Alai of Celtel, part of the MTC Group.
MTN is the largest operator in the region as a result of its $5.5 billion acquisition in May of Investcom, a company with stakes in several Middle Eastern operators. MTN's boss, Mr Nhleko, says the firm will focus on Africa and the Middle East, where there is plenty of room for growth. MTC expanded in the other direction, from the Middle East into Africa. The Kuwaiti firm bought Celtel, which runs networks mainly in east Africa, for $3.4 billion in 2005. It has since purchased a stake in a Nigerian operator and arranged a $4 billion credit facility to pay for further expansion.
Until last month Vodacom was prevented from expanding north of the equator by a pact between its British and South African parents. But the deal has now been scrapped, so Vodacom is on the move. This week its chief operating officer, Pieter Uys, said it was targeting Algeria, Nigeria, Ghana and Angola. Etisalat, the UAE's partially state-owned operator, bought a 50% stake in Atlantique Telecom, which operates throughout west Africa, in April 2005. It has also expanded into Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in July it paid $2.8 billion for Egypt's third mobile licence—a staggering sum that only a year ago would have purchased an entire regional operator.
As others pile into Africa, Orascom has been pulling out, having sold its stakes in a dozen African operators. It is now targeting “highly populated, under-penetrated markets,” says Ossama Bessada, a senior executive at the Egyptian firm. It has operations in the Middle East, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and plans to bid for a licence in Saudi Arabia next year. Naguib Sawiris, Orascom's chief executive, also owns Weather Investments, which paid €12.1 billion last year to take control of Wind, Italy's third-largest mobile operator.
Meanwhile, operators in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman are hunting around for acquisitions too. Targets include Millicom, which was almost bought by China Mobile this year, Econet Wireless of South Africa, and the 50 or so independent mobile operators scattered throughout the region.
Some firms are even looking north, to southern and eastern Europe, for acquisitions. “They are getting very brave now, and they're looking beyond their traditional markets,” says Devine Kofiloto, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. Middle Eastern operators were among the bidders for Mobi63, a Serbian operator, earlier this year. Etisalat narrowly lost a fight for Turkey's Telsim to Vodafone in 2005. And Mr Sawiris has expressed interest in a Greek operator.
The arrival of Middle Eastern and African operators, with their innovative, low-cost business models, could put pressure on European operators. Celtel's One Network, for example, eliminates roaming charges for customers travelling between the adjacent countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Subscribers can add airtime in different currencies and carry it across borders. Celtel has, in effect, created a unified market of the kind that regulators can only dream about in Europe. African operators are also pioneering per-second billing and mobile-phone banking.
The rise of these regional operators brings great joy to Mo Ibrahim, the founder of Celtel, who is regarded as one of the fathers of Africa's mobile industry. He has created a $100m venture fund for African entrepreneurs and a foundation that offers a $5m prize to African leaders who promote good governance. As pan-African operators emerge, they are not just providing telecoms services across the continent—they are a force for change within it.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Students make mobile phone news
A class of 12 and 13-year-olds from Lilian Baylis Technology School in Lambeth, London transformed their personal gadgets into news-gathering device.
Year eight students snapped photographs using their mobile phones and combined them with radio reports, which they recorded using an iPod or a traditional microphone.
The result was a series of multi-media news reports available to download from the internet.
Watch and listen to the students' reports
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
Lambeth City Learning Centre (CLC) manager Abigail Norton, was at the school to assist students with the technology and upload their news to the CLC website.
She said: "Using mobile phones, and other technology, in the classroom makes students feel professional and encourages them to value their work."
She added: "Lilian Baylis has rules about when students can and can't use their mobile phones, but some schools won't allow phones under any circumstances. It's great to be working with people who are keen to investigate the educational potential of hand-held devices."
Making the news
After researching the news using a collection of daily newspapers and news websites, students gathered interviews on their mobile phones. This information was used to inform their radio scripts.
Amy, 13, writes her news script.
Amy, 13, writes her news script.
Thabo, 12, said: "Normally in class, we record information in writing. Today, we wrote scripts and used technology, so it was a good balance."
BBC News Interactive journalist, Lucie Mclean, who specialises in mobile phones, added: "Using phones meant students could gather news quickly as they were already familiar with the technology."
Students also captured and listened to their own voices on their phones in preparation for the final recording.
Teacher and head of citizenship at the school, Abi Kendall, said: "Using mobile phones to rehearse in this way means students are more confident when it comes to standing up in front of a class."
Gary, 12, added: "If you keep practising, you are less nervous about making a mistake."
The recording deadline was scheduled for 1400 and Hassan, 13, was the last of 28 students to present his report - about gun crime in south London.
He explained: "I lost my script and had to write it out again from memory. It was a bit of a rush at the end and I felt under pressure because of the deadline but I managed to keep my cool."
Ivan, 12, records his news report.
Ivan, 12, records his news report.
The final news reports were recorded using a traditional microphone to ensure a high-quality recording.
During future workshops, CLC manager Abigail Norton plans to boost sound recorded using a mobile phone in an editing package, before making it available to download from the internet.
She also plans to transfer students' reports back to their mobile phones, enabling those without internet access to show their friends and relatives their work at the end of the school day.
Technology
Lambeth CLC technician George Belfield edits the students' work.
Lambeth CLC technician George Belfield edits the students' work.
Students' photographs were transferred to a computer using Bluetooth technology.
They were combined a radio report to create an audio/video file (mpeg4) using a software package called GarageBand from Apple.
BBC News journalist Chris Moore, who passed on his news-making tips to the students, said: "There were several budding journalists buzzing with boisterous creativity. They were good at writing short reports, which is a valuable skill to have in radio journalism."
As well as encouraging other students to make the news with the help of the BBC, teacher Abi Kendall, is planning to organise an after-school journalism club.
She said: "There is so much to be gained from an activity like this. The students improved their literacy skills, without even realising it, but what was particularly interesting for me was to see them working as a team.
"There was a great deal of camaraderie and a real desire to help one another to succeed."
Education consultant, Liz Abbensetts, added: "It encouraged students to pool their experience - of news and technology - to help one another. It's an incredibly motivating experience."
School news project
Uryas, 12, and Ivan, 12, research their news story.
Uryas, 12, and Ivan, 12, research their news story.
The Year 8 pupils made news as part of BBC News School Report, which encourages students to make TV, radio and online news in their schools and publish it on a school website.
Sixty UK schools, including Lilian Baylis, are involved in the 2006/7 pilot stage of the project which the BBC hopes to extend to all secondary schools in the future.
School Report will culminate in a national School Report News Day on 22 March 2007, in which all 60 schools will simultaneously make and publish their news on the internet.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
بريتش تليكوم تفتح فرعا بالجزائر لتطوير التقنية
أعلنت شركة الهاتف وتكنولوجيا الإعلام والاتصال (بريتش تليكوم) فتح فرع لها في الجزائر بداية من 16 من شهر ديسمبر/كانون الجاري. وسيكون الفرع بمثابة مركز محوري لتطوير وتوصيل التقنيات المتطورة لكل منطقة المغرب العربي والقارة الأفريقية.
وأبلغ المتحدث باسم مجلس الأعمال الجزائري البريطاني أرسلان شيخاوي، الجزيرة نت أن بريتش تليكوم تعتبر السوق الجزائرية أهم سوق في المنطقة لما تتوفر عليه من إمكانات بشرية وتقنية عالية ومنافسة قوية بفضل القوانين المشجعة والمحيط المفتوح.
وقال شيخاوي إن بريتش تليكوم لن تشتري حصصا في شركة اتصالات الجزائر، وإنما ستسهم في تطويرها ومساعدتها في الحصول على أحدث التقنيات.
وقد توصل مجلس الأعمال الجزائري البريطاني إلى إقناع بريتش تليكوم العملاقة بفتح هذا الفرع، بعد سنتين من الاتصالات والمفاوضات. وتم الاتفاق على أن يكون مركزا محوريا يغطي منطقة المغرب العربي وأفريقيا. ويشرف على فرع الجزائر في مرحلة أولى عضو مجلس إدارة المجموعة المكلف بالتعاون الدولي بول فولكنر.
ويعمل المجلس الجزائري البريطاني حسب المتحدث الرسمي على جبهات عدة بهدف جلب مستثمرين ومتعاملين اقتصاديين للعمل في السوق الجزائرية بينها المجموعات البريطانية الكبرى في مجالات التكنولوجيا والمصارف.
فقد توصلت مجموعة أوروجيرو المتخصصة في نقل الأموال إلى اتفاق مع عدد من البنوك والمؤسسات المالية الجزائرية للعمل من أجل تطوير وتحديث أساليبها وشبكاتها منها البنك الوطني الجزائري، والقرض الشعبي الجزائري، البنك المعروض للخصخصة، وبريد الجزائر التي تعد أكبر مؤسسة مالية من حيث شبكتها الوطنية لنقل الأموال.
وفي مجال الأمن التكنولوجي تجري محادثات متقدمة مع مجموعة كرول للاستقرار في الجزائر، وعرض خدماتها في مجال الأمن التكنولوجي للشركات والمتعاملين الاقتصاديين الجزائريين، والأجانب العاملين في قطاع التكنولوجيات المتطورة والذين هم بحاجة ماسة لخدمات الأمن.
