Zain races to connect Nigeria
With nearly 50 million subscribers, Nigeria is Africa’s largest mobile market, adding about one
million new users per month. We speak to Zain Nigeria’s John Earley about the challenges
of working in such a fast-growth market.
T
he sheer thirst for mobile communica-
tions in emerging markets is probably
nowhere better illustrated than in Ni-
geria. Operators in this dynamic and diverse
African nation find themselves racing to sat-
isfy subscriber demand to make calls.
“Nigerian telecoms is the victim of fan-
tastic growth. Every day I live and breathe
“
Every day I live and breathe
the need to build capacity,”
says John Earley.
the need to build capacity,” says Mr. John
Earley, Chief Technical Officer, at Zain Ni-
geria, which is the new name and brand for
what was formerly called Celtel Nigeria.
“Our focus is to get as much capacity
as possible into the right areas to improve
the quality of network performance, which
translates into improved customer experi-
ence. Often, retaining customers is simply
about whether they can make a call or not.
“Many people are registered on several
networks and carry two, three or even four
handsets with different SIM cards - trying
each, in turn, until they can make a call.
There is a huge, underserved population
with mobile devices but who cannot make
a call.”
Zain is currently investing around one
billion US dollars per year in its network,
with most of the money going into building
capacity, says Earley.
8 Expanding Horizons 3/2008
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