Consolidation will come to Afghanistan’s mobile market in the next 18-36 months, predicted Karim Khoja, CEO of the country’s biggest operator Roshan, on Tuesday.
Speaking to Total Telecom on the sidelines of the Total Telecom Festival in London, he explained that the withdrawal of foreign troops has resulted in a dearth of big-spending consumer customers, causing the value of the mobile market to plunge 30%-40%.
In that context, "it doesn’t make sense to support five-to-six mobile operators in a harsh market" like Afghanistan, said Khoja.
However, the regulatory environment is under-developed in Afghanistan, to put it mildly. Putting it less mildly, "there is no regulator of any competence," said Khoja, which makes acquiring a rival mobile operator a challenging prospect.
In the meantime, for its part, Roshan is pursuing opportunities in the enterprise market in a bid to fill the void left by foreign soldiers, providing cloud and data centre services to over-the-top (OTT) players like WhatsApp and Viber who, in Khoja’s words, "don’t physically want to be in Afghanistan."
In addition, Roshan has entered into a site-sharing agreement with an unnamed competitor in a bid to reduce costs. It also has wholesale access to state-owned incumbent Afghan Telecom’s fibre backbone network.
Over the longer term though, Khoja believes consolidation is inevitable.
Afghanistan has six mobile operators: Roshan, MTN, Etisalat, Afghan Wireless, CDMA operator Wasel, and state-owned Salaam, which is the newest entrant, having launched services in April 2014.
Khoja predicted that "Salaam will go first", but remained tight-lipped about whether Roshan is considering making a move.
However, "Roshan is the biggest and we’re not going to leave Afghanistan," he said. "We are probably going to be a consolidator in this market."
