Africa > East Africa > Mozambique > Mozambique Communication Profile

Mozambique: Mozambique Communication Profile

2013/08/15

During the last two decades Mozambique’s economy has shown consistently strong growth. The country’s GDP was largely unaffected by the global economic crisis which has lingered for many economies since 2008. GDP growth ran at 7.3% in 2010 and is expected to increase to 8.4% for 2013.

The country was one of the first in the region to reform its telecom sector, which immediately followed the long civil war which ended in 1992. The mobile sector has experienced excellent growth rates since the introduction of competition in 2003 between Vodacom Mozambique and mCel, the incumbent mobile subsidiary of the national telco TDM. Given that mobile market penetration remains far below the African average, there is considerable room for further growth. This has been stimulated by the launch of commercial services from the third operator Movitel, which is backed by Vietnam’s Viettel.

The government in 2013 drafted a revision of the 2004 Telecommunications Act, aimed at developing greater competition, and facilitating access to networks and infrastructure in a bid to reduce investment costs.

The mobile sector has grown rapidly in view of the poor fixed-line infrastructure, which has largely held back the market for internet services. The high cost of international bandwidth had long hampered internet use given the relatively high cost of access, though the landing of two international submarine fibre optic cables (Seacom and EASSy) has reduced the cost of bandwidth and so led to drastic reductions in broadband retail prices.

Cross-platform competition, with active ADSL, cable broadband, WiMAX, 3G mobile and limited Fibre-to-the-Premise (FttP) services, is also helping the market to develop. Further improvements can be expected from the ongoing rollout of a national fibre backbone networks by TDM and the mobile operators.

Estimated market penetration rates in – end-2014Mozambique’s telecoms sector globserver

Market Penetration rate
Mobile 56%
Fixed 0.3%
Internet 7.9%

 

)Mozambique’s telecoms sector

 

Internet country code: 

.mz

Communications note: