A couple of weeks ago, the Government of Ghana became the official owner of AirtelTigo after the parent company, Bharti Airtel sold its remaining shares to the Government.
Although there is no official confirmation of ongoing talks, there have been some mumblings that the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization is considering creating a duopoly in the Ghana telecoms industry by merging AirtelTigo and Vodafone. The Government of Ghana currently has a 30% stake in Vodafone.
MTN is currently the biggest player in the marketplace with about 69% market share.
The rumored consideration is to give MTN better competition in the marketplace. A combination of AirtelTigo and Vodafone would give the combined entity an estimated 40% market share.
The Ministry last year declared MTN a significant market power because the entity had 75% ownership of voice, data, and mobile money in the marketplace. In that declaration, the Ministry.
The National Communications Authority stated that MTN had to abide by new rules because of this declaration and were required to do the following:
- Implement on-net/off-net parity to ensure the cost of voice and SMS communication from MTN to MTN lines, and from MTN to lines on other networks is the same
- Implement a 30% asymetrical interconnect rate for two years, to ensure that other telcos pay 30% less per call/SMS to MTN when they do interconnect reconciliation.
- Present implementation plans on National Roaming Services within the next 30 days for execution on or before the next 90 days.
MTN is currently abiding by these rules.
Again, there’s no official word if these ongoing talks would yield anything but the idea doesn’t seem far fetched:
We’ll keep an eye out for any updates or confirmed reports of a merger between Vodafone and AirtelTigo.
