Vodafone Ghana boss voice out on market share argument

Vodafone Ghana CEO, Kyle Whitehill has finally voiced out on the recent market share argument, saying he believed the National Communication Authority (NCA) published nothing more than the figures operators submitted to it every 90-days.

“We all give the same set of information to the NCA at the end of every 90-days and my view is that the NCA simply publishes what we give them,” he told Adom News at the Second Mobileworld Ghana Telecom Awards.

This comment raises questions about a recent claim by an NCA official that the Authority audits the figures submitted by the operators based on laid down criteria before publishing them.

Subscriber figures published by the NCA since October last year indicated Vodafone has taken over the second largest operator by subscribers position from Tigo. Bt Tigo also claimed in its own annual report ending December 2011, that it was still the second of five operators in Ghana.

Vodafone had been rather been quiet over the issue, but an official of the NCA was quoted in sections of the media as saying Tigo had no authorization and the capacity to determine the subscriber base of other telcos because it had no access to the networks of those telcos, like the NCA did, to audit the figures those telcos presented.

The NCA official then stated that it had been auditing the figures by going to the premises of each telco to do checks based on laid down criteria. This was confirmed by an official of Airtel who said he was aware the NCA worked with technical team to confirm subscriber levels.

But Kyle Whitehill maintained the NCA simply publishes what operators gave to it.

He noted that all telcos used different methods in determining their subscriber base so Vodafone was not in the position to tell how many active subscribers each telco had apart from what the telcos presented to the NCA to be published.

“But I can assure you that at Vodafone, all the subscribers we report within the stipulated 90-days are active revenue generating customers on our network – those who are not active we disconnect them and do not report them,” he said.

Kyle Whitehill said Vodafone did not bother itself too much with who had this or that number of subscribers because “the most important thing is, are your customers happy, do they want to be on your network – that is what we care about.”

Meanwhile, the former MD for Kasapa (Expresso), Bob Palitz had said that what should be of concern to telcos was not the number of subscribers they had, but how much traffic there was on their network.

He said if a subscriber sat on a network and did not make or receive calls, that subscriber neither added any value to the telco nor to national development and that subscriber was practically non-existent.

Bob Palitz said Tigo's method of capturing only subscribers who made at least one call, either to a Tigo number, or from Tigo to another number with the 60 and or 90 days had flaws in the face of a huge customer base of MTN, for instance.

“It is possible that millions of active MTN customers may not call any Tigo number within the 60 or 90 days so those may not be captured under Tigo's method even though those customers were active,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Tigo had since shifted the goal poles slightly on its market position claim by stating in the first quarter report for 2012 that its market position in Ghana could be second or third, and not exactly second as it claimed earlier.

Story by Samuel Nii Narku Dowuona/Adom News/Ghana