Barring intervention from the country's telecom regulator, Etisalat Nigeria will offer subscribers free network-to-network calling for no less than six months to win over mobile subscribers.
The operator joined the competition last week with the launch of GSM (Global Service for Mobile Communications) services in seven Nigerian cities.
"We have a robust network that would allow us to accommodate a huge number of subscribers and do what we need to do to change this market," said one Etisalat Nigeria senior official.
The Nigerian market is crucial for the United Arab Emirates telco, which plans to become a global brand by 2010. It already has an 82 percent stake in Atlantique Telecom -- based in Côte d'Ivoire, with mobile networks in Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Gabon, Niger and Togo -- and a subscriber base of 2.9 million at the end of 2007.
The company operates in the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) under the brand name Moov. A successful push in the Nigeria market would see the company redefining the entire ECOWAS telecom landscape with a complete rebranding of Moov into Etisalat.
"The Nigerian market will determine the fate of the Moov brand in Franco West Africa," said a Moov senior official. "A successful Etisalat brand in Nigeria will make it imperative to have Moov dropped for Etisalat."
Etisalat is entering Africa's most populous country of 160 million people with a large war chest and vast experience in delivering mobile services in developing markets. The company hopes that will count as it competes for new subscribers and already saturated markets major cities, where it will have to contend with Glo Mobile, MTN, Zain and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) operators redefining a mobile market once ruled by GSM.
CDMA operators have used lower entry cost and substantially lower call tariffs to win over GSM users. More than 4.5 million CDMA subscribers have emerged in Nigeria over the last 14 months, leading to the conviction by marketing watchers that Nigeria could transition to a CDMA-dominant market in the near future.
"Evidently, GSM has a strong grip on the market, but this is a waiting CDMA market," said Lagos telecom analyst Titi Omo-Ettu.
Etisalat, however, is weighing its options. Free network-to-network calling for six months could cause mass dumping of other networks' GSM SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards in preference for the new network, a move the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) could deem anticompetitive.
It could also stir similar actions by other networks, particularly Glo Mobile, to open a major war that may not "augur well for the sector in the long run," said an NCC official in Abuja.
Nigeria's newest operator has consistently hinged its winnings on superior network technology and service. But these factors may count for nothing in a market where numbers are critical to staying afloat and brand relevance is tied to the volume of subscribers.
"We are bringing juice to the market -- something Nigerians will find hard to resist; enough reasons to leave others for us," said the Etisalat Nigeria official.
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