Did popular mobilization pay? Or a suspension for “defective form”, as mentioned on Monday evening, April 10, the Minister of Communication and the Digital Economy, Amadou Coulibaly, on the set of Radiodiffusion Télévision Ivoirienne (RTI)? The increase in mobile data rates is no longer on the agenda in Côte d’Ivoire.
On April 7, the three telephone operators who share the market, Orange, MTN and Moov, had jointly reduced the volume of data included in 4G packages, while maintaining their prices. Consumers immediately rose up against this measure: a petition “for the cost of the Internet connection in Côte d’Ivoire to be cheaper than in Somalia” collected more than 45,800 signatures.
The average cost of a gigabyte varies widely across African countries. In Côte d’Ivoire, according to the “Worldwide Mobile Data Pricing 2022” study, it is around 3 dollars (2.75 euros), compared to only 0.61 dollars in Ghana and 0.63 dollars in Somalia. “Here, we are taxed three times, explains Cyriac Gbogou, specialist in information and communication technologies. First there is the 18% VAT, then a 3% tax that Internet users pay directly, then a 7.2% tax that the operator must pay to the regulator. The cost of the license is 100 billion CFA francs [about 150,000 euros] per operator! »
To make the telephone companies bend, Tiémoko Assalé, deputy mayor of Tiassalé, launched a “citizen boycott” on April 8, 9 and 10, calling for the interruption of telephone calls, text messages, Internet browsing and “mobile money” transactions between 12 and 2 p.m. In a video published Saturday on his Facebook account and widely relayed (25,000 likes to date), the independent elected official directly attacked the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Côte d’Ivoire (ARTCI) “for its incomprehensible decision” and to the operators “for their greed and for all their works against the Ivorians, for decades”.
Strong growth in revenues
On the side of the respondents, the embarrassment is palpable. The ARTCI split on April 7 with a jargon press release in which it claims not to have prescribed any tariff increase measure to operators. “The sole purpose [of the framing of offers decided in January], she specifies, is to improve competition between operators, ensure consumer protection and ensure the sustainable development of the mobile telephony market”.
And that’s where the shoe pinches: operators, to gain market share in a very competitive environment, have so far sold mobile data at a loss by catching up on other services such as “voice”. i.e. phone calls. A practice that ARTCI would like to see stopped. Especially as the sector consolidates.
According to figures compiled by the regulatory authority, revenues on the “data” service have grown significantly over the period 2020-2021: by 31.6% for Orange, 21.6% for MTN and 14.6% for Mov. As for the growth in margins, it was 6.4% for Moov, 39% for MTN and 95% for Orange thanks to the “strong increase in uses”, underlines ARTCI.
An argument taken up by Amadou Coulibaly during his speech on Monday evening. The Minister of Communication spoke of “tough competition” between the big telecommunications players and a “hunt for advantages” to retain and acquire new customers, with ever more attractive promotional offers. This would have caused a form of “disorder”.
It is for “a formal defect” – the nature of which he did not specify – that ARTCI would have asked operators to return to previous rates for the time being, assures Amadou Coulibaly. Discussions, already initiated in January 2022 between ARTCI, operators and around fifteen civil society organizations, must now resume in an attempt to rebalance the sector. While taking into account the interests of consumers and trying not to aggravate the digital divide in a country where the Internet penetration rate barely reaches 34%.