African mobile operators need to grow their data services over the next five years if they want to compete in the evolving telecommunications market, an expert has said.

Laurent Viviez, a partner at global management and consulting firm, AT Kearney, made these remarks during a delivery of his company’s white paper titled: “African Telecoms at a crossroads”.

Viviez said the growth rate of new mobile subscribers in Africa is on a steady decline as the market reaches saturation point.

He says between the years 2000 and 2012, the growth in mobile subscribers was about 40% and it has been stagnant. However, he added that in the next 5 years he expects growth to slow down to 7%.

Viviez added that intense competition among mobile operators in Africa has placed immense pressure on growth levels.

“Growth in the adoption of telecoms services has been breathtaking, largely driven by mobile voice services. There are now 730 million mobile subscriptions,” said Viviez.

He further says there must be a shift towards data services as this could offer substantial long-term growth prospects.

According to the research paper, mobile data services represent only 12% of African telecoms operators’ total revenues.

“However, there is evidence that African consumers have significant interest in accessing internet services, provided services are affordable and relevant.

“And mobile broadband will constitute an important market and represent the bulk of computer based access to the internet,” Viviez said.

It is broader access to data services where African mobile operators could expect to see growth to come from over the next five years, he explained.

Viviez further said that access to data is important to develop the value-added services in Africa and this includes services such as social networking, mobile content, and mobile financial services.

“The market for data and mobile value-added services (VAS) in Africa is expected to grow by 16% per annum to reach $16 billion by 2016, representing close to 32% of total mobile revenues,” Viviez concluded.

Thecla Mbongue, an analyst for Informa Telecoms & Media, agrees that telecoms companies in Africa could focus more on data. However, she adds that voice revenues could further continue to dominate these companies’ revenues in the next five years.

“The decline in voice revenues -mostly due to price wars and lower interconnection rates - is indeed compensated by increased data usage and therefore data revenues,” said Mbongue.

“We do however forecast that voice will still make over 75% of the continent’s mobile revenues by 2017. In South Africa, we forecast that the share of voice revenues will decline from about 80% at present to around 50% in 2017,” Mbongue added.