Ethiopia will award two telecoms licenses to multinational mobile companies, Reuters reported, citing a senior official. State Minister of Finance Eyob Tekalign Tolina said the government will also offer a minority stake in monopoly operator Ethio Telecom. The minister made the statement in reference to two new licenses and a 49 percent stake in Ethio Telecom. A senior executive at one of the companies interested in entering Ethiopia told Reuters that the market structure announced on 5 July is “as expected and very sensible approach”.
The structure is the same as the one Myanmar adopted when it privatized its market in 2013. The government there received more than twenty bids for its two licenses. Vodafone, MTN, Orange and Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates are likely to be among the leading contenders vying for entry into the Ethiopian market. Analysts said the market structure showed that the government had done what officials had publicly said they would do: review the experiences of other countries in opening up their telecoms sectors to determine what had worked and what had failed.
The state minister did not provide a timeline for the bidding process, but he said in June that the government hoped to open bidding in September. The government will expect the winning companies to start operations in 2020, initially using Ethio Telecom’s infrastructure to run their networks, the sources said.
