NEW MARKETS:When business-man Alieu Conteh decided to build a cellular network in Congo there was a civil war raging.
Rebel fighters were closing in on Kinshasa airport, preventing him from importing a telecommunications mast.
Refusing to give up, he hired local residents to collect scrap metal and weld it into a tower, and thus was born a mobile phone business that now boats close to three million customers.
The story has become something of a parable in Africa, highlighting the continent's ingenuity and resilience but also its growing passion for mobile phones.
Vodacom, the South African-based company, which bought out most of Conteh's business, has now up to 30 million customers in five African states.
Growth on the continent is outstripping Europe and the US, and the potential hasn't been missed by Irish companies in the telecommunications trade.
AdaptiveMobile, a Dublin-based security software firm, is opening its first African office in Johannesburg on August 1st having secured a multi-million euro contract with Vodacom.
Lorcan Burke, chief executive of AdaptiveMobile, said it was looking at having 25-30 per cent of its revenues coming from Africa in future. The company is in discussions with operators in Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda, and has put a sales team together to seek out opportunities elsewhere on the continent.
"If you go to any African nation, mobile phones are everywhere," said the company's head of sales Colin Brown. "Africa is extremely strategic to us. We see it as a very good medium- to long-term opportunity for this company."
He pointed out that while income levels were relatively low compared to Europe, customers spent a higher proportion of their income on mobile phones. It wasn't unusual, he remarked, for people to be living in basic accommodation while using advanced cellular technology.
A key driver of the mobile phone industry in Africa has been the poor fixed-line telecoms infrastructure. In Nigeria, for example, the cost of a broadband line is up to €2,500 a month, and it is partly as a result of this that the country has the highest mobile internet traffic in the world.
As African states have grown more industrialised, and as migration has increased, mobile phones have also become an essential tool for families wishing to stay in touch across countries and perhaps even continents.
Conor Fahy of Enterprise Ireland, which held a trade mission to South Africa last year with Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin, says: "We were surprised at how some of the companies from that part of the world were already rolling out applications pointed at a small percentage of the market.
"We found the market very sophisticated in South Africa, especially with the type of technologies they were using." He suggested this was good news for Irish companies as "value-added applications is the area they like to play in".
A number of Irish-owned companies have received support from Enterprise Ireland to try to secure contracts in Africa, albeit the scope for investment was limited, says Fahy. They could justify investing in fewer than 10 Irish companies in South Africa at present, whereas "we would be dealing in multiples of that in the Middle East", he says.
In the case of South Africa, he noted, Irish companies had to compete with a strong indigenous technology industry.
Dublin-based company Mobile Aware is one Enterprise Ireland client that is seeking to increase its foothold in Africa. It has already secured service infrastructure deals with network providers in Mozambique and Morocco. Chief executive Kevin McCloskey says Africa is "a very fast-growing market, and one we would see with a lot of potential," he added, pointing out that consumer market growth was much stronger there than in Europe and North America.
It is not just Irish telecommunications companies eying Africa for business, however. Last month, a Saudi cellphone operator announced plans to spend $1 billion (€750 million) on seven licenses in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania.
The scramble for operating licenses and service contracts is set to intensify, and for companies that get in early the rewards could be huge.
While 80 per cent of people in South Africa have a mobile phone, the figure for Egypt is just 20 per cent, and it is with this in mind firms like Vodacom are looking to expand across the continent.
However, the company has been less successful than its main domestic and pan-African rival MTN in penetrating new markets. South African-based MTN had, at the end of March, 44.3 million customers across 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East.
There were reports last month that Vodacom was considering a $480 million (€360 million) bid for Nigerian cellphone company MTel. Whether or not that deals comes off, it is clear the mobile phone industry in Africa - and the sums involved - will just continue growing.
