{"id":42191,"date":"2013-07-17T16:27:16","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T14:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=42191"},"modified":"2013-07-18T09:43:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-18T07:43:45","slug":"no-space-for-4-mobile-players-in-sa-knott-craig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/trending\/42191\/no-space-for-4-mobile-players-in-sa-knott-craig\/","title":{"rendered":"No space for 4 mobile players in SA: Knott-Craig"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cell C<\/a> CEO Alan Knott-Craig<\/a> believes that the current South African market is not conducive for four profitable mobile operators.<\/p>\n

Knott-Craig was answering questions at Cell C\u2019s headquarters in Sandton on Wednesday (17 July).<\/p>\n

He said that it was probably too late by as much as seven years to have a fourth operator in the market.<\/p>\n

Cell C launched in 2001,\u00a0as the country\u2019s third\u00a0mobile operator, joining MTN<\/a> and Vodacom<\/a>. Roll on nearly ten years, and Telkom<\/a> launched its own mobile division, 8ta in October 2010. The 8ta brand has subsequently morphed into a new brand, Telkom Mobile<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Telkom unbundled its 50% stake in Vodacom in 2009.<\/p>\n

Knott-Craig said that an ideal situation would see four operators each with a market share of 25%; however, that isn\u2019t the case.<\/p>\n

In June, Telkom\u2019s financial reports revealed that it only had 1,534,265 active mobile subscribers at 31 March 2013, up 3.4% from a year earlier.<\/p>\n

In comparison, Cell C currently claims a 14% market share in SA, while Vodacom\u2019s share is over 52% with\u00a0more than 30 million subscribers, and MTN, with\u00a0in excess of 25 million subscribers, has an approximate share of 33%.<\/p>\n

A veteran in the industry, Knott-Craig opined that operators needed a minimum of 25% market share in order to be profitable, something he said Cell C is working at achieving over the next few years, having seen its customers swell to 11.5 million, from 9 million over the past 18 months.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday (17 July),\u00a0Cell C\u00a0announced a new pre-paid product under the\u00a0Red Bull Mobile<\/a>\u00a0brand that gives subscribers 200MB per month for 12 months for R99 once-off. \u00a0Knott-Craig said that smaller operators would have to introduce clever promotions like its partnership with Red Bull in order to claim a bigger market share.<\/p>\n

More on Cell C<\/h3>\n

25% market share achievable: Knott-Craig<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Cell C unveils new Red Bull Mobile data promotion<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Cell C: where the billions will go<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Cell C network problems blamed on Vodacom<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cell C gets R3.5 billion cash boost<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cell C talking to MVNO players: report<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Telkom dismisses Cell C merger talks<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig believes that the current South African market is not conducive for four profitable mobile operators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":27136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43,42,26,28,6271,27],"class_list":["post-42191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-alan-knott-craig","tag-cell-c","tag-headline","tag-mtn","tag-red-bull-mobile","tag-vodacom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42191"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42195,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42191\/revisions\/42195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}