As global economies continue to recover from the worldwide recession of 2008 and 2009, with a number of developed economies still struggling, the emerging economies of the world have shown the strongest growth, especially in Africa. One area where this is most evident is the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. This sector is a key socio-economic driver, as it has a huge beneficial impact on social and economic development and contributes significantly to GDP growth. The vast investment going into fixed-line and wireless communication technologies in Africa, South America and parts of Asia is helping to open up these economies and accelerate growth and development more rapidly than in developed nations. These trends are clearly illustrated in the annual Connectivity Scorecard study commissioned by Nokia Siemens Networks and conducted by Professor Leonard Waverman, Dean of the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary in Canada, in conjunction with the economic consulting group LECG. The Connectivity Scorecard is the first study to rank 50 countries around the world in terms of useful connectivity: that is, the extent to which governments, businesses and consumers make use of ICT to enhance a country's social and economic prosperity. The study groups economies into two separate indexes, to account for differences in the level of their development. The indexes rank economies according to the World Economic Forum's definition of innovation, resource and efficiencydriven economies. Developed economies, which are driven largely by the intersection of technological innovation, globalisation and deregulation, fall into the innovation-driven economy index; developing and emerging economies are classified as resource and efficiencydriven economies, and are grouped together for the purpose of the study. The scores are determined by the measurement of a series of indicators for each country in two areas –infrastructure and usage, plus skills – in the categories of business, government and consumer markets. Individual weightings are allocated to each sub-category of the country, with a larger weighting applied to business, since it is a key contributor to productivity growth. The Connectivity Scorecard therefore measures countries on a relative basis rather than on an absolute basis, with low scores reflecting gaps in a country's infrastructure and/or usage. Historically, African countries have done well in the study, with South Africa leading the pack in 2009 and 2010. Other key African nations that feature prominently in the study include Nigeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya and Botswana. This is mainly due to the large scale investment going into fixed-line and wireless connectivity infrastructure, as service providers look to expand reach and market share in these burgeoning markets. South Africa has done particularly well in the study, placing fourth in 2009 and second in 2010, due largely to the robust spending and investments being made into ICT by the business and public sector, as well as the high level of business usage and ICT skills in the market. This reflects the fact that the larger South African corporations are sophisticated IT users, especially compared with other resource and efficiency-driven economies. However, there is room for improvement in the consumer segment, as the country displays low Internet subscription levels, as well as usage. The case is different in the mobile sector as South Africa's mobile telephony penetration and coverage range from good to very good, with high level SMS usage; but it is lacking voice minute usage when compared with other resource and efficiency-driven economies. This robust investment is being driven mainly by large-scale fibre infrastructure projects aimed at harnessing the massive amounts of international bandwidth available from a number of undersea fibre optic cable systems that have come online in recent years. The SEACOM and Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) along the East coast of Africa, along with the West African Cable System (WACS) and the incumbent SAT-3 cable system along the West coast, has increased international broadband capacity exponentially, to the point where it is now cheaper than local bandwidth capacity. The major hurdle in the advancement of the local connectivity market has been the widespread inability of service providers to access the incumbent operator's local loop, as well as a lack of suitable infrastructure to deliver all this capacity to the door of businesses and consumers. This has resulted in some level of fixed-mobile substitution, where home users adopt mobile data as their primary source of connectivity. However, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has experienced a great deal of demand for our 40G technology on fibre, and there are a number of new fibre infrastructure projects rolling out in South Africa, driven either by government or consortiums of service providers and network operators. Due to the restraints of the local loop in the country, NSN also expects that the broadband access market for home use will be dominated by wireless and DSL services for some time to come. From a satellite perspective, large bluechip corporates – for whom connectivity is mission critical – still rely on satellite services to provide an essential level of redundancy. A number of projects aimed at providing connectivity services to rural and remote areas are also using a combination of satellite services and next generation wireless networks to reach these untapped markets. Satellite projects such as the Google-backed O3b and Intelsat SA's New Dawn satellite will benefit both South Africa and Africa, as more high capacity broadband services will be provisioned to the African continent in the near future. Despite these factors, South Africa dropped down the Connectivity Scorecard rankings in 2011, but this was mainly due to the more robust data and methodology used – specifically, a re-weighting that affected the business components of the scorecard; and also the use of new data and indicators, such as usage, that adversely affected South Africa. In 2011 South Africa fell seven places to rank ninth among the resource and efficiency-driven economies. However, when these fibre and satellite services come online we can expect a marked increase in the connectivity capabilities of a number of African countries, including South Africa, as they will bypass the barriers currently in place around the provisioning of ICT services, specifically high speed connectivity. This will make the Internet a part of everyone's life and will increase capacity from Kbits per second to Mbits per seconds. The key element, relating to the Connectivity Scorecard, is a country's ability to utilise these services to improve its level of socio-economic growth. Taking a closer look at the scorecard, a similar pattern can be seen in the performance of all the other African nations discussed, with the exception of South Africa. They display a satisfactory performance in the consumer segment, driven by adequate mobile network penetration. However, focused development in areas such as human capital and regulatory frameworks needs the most work, as these areas will enable the countries to look beyond the mobile sector for growth. The challenges and potential are evenly matched, thereby calling for sustained efforts across all segments to harness existing potential, with fixed-line fibre infrastructure playing the primary role in provisioning affordable high speed connectivity services. More specifically, Botswana has moderate consumer and weak business infrastructure, yet it has strong business usage of ICT. The country needs to further develop ICT infrastructure, especially fibre infrastructure, to improve measures like broadband penetration and Internet connectivity. Despite its high mobile penetration, Kenya's low ICT investments by businesses and the government affect its overall ICT development. However, the telecommunications sector is progressive and increased investment into fibre and satellite capacity can greatly enhance its capabilities. Tunisia has a strong consumer segment as a result of heavy investments in the telecom sector since the mid-1990s, which has created one of the most developed telecommunications infrastructures in Northern Africa. A high penetration rate driven by nearly 100% mobile network coverage is the country's biggest advantage. However, the country is held back by mediocre to low performances across the business and government segments and will do well to focus on a supportive regulatory framework, while developing basic human capital to boost overall ICT development. Supported by a strong showing in mobile telephony, Nigeria's relative strengths lie in the consumer segment. Poor performance across business and government is holding back its overall ICT development. Lastly, Egypt remains at the lower end of Africa's resource and efficiency-driven economies due to its weak business and consumer categories. Its relative strength lies in the government segment, but it needs sustained growth across all sectors to see real advancement. It is clear that significant investment into the provisioning of fibre infrastructure will greatly assist the majority of Africa's strongest resource and efficiency-driven economies in the Connectivity Scorecard study. This should see them improve their rankings in years to come, especially as it will allow them to tap into the wealth of international bandwidth capacity running up and down the African coastline. For land-locked nations, satellite services will greatly boost ICT capabilities in the short term; as they build out more sustainable, lower cost connectivity capabilities, such as fibre and next generation wireless networks.

Price wars have always been a controversial topic of discussion at industry seminars and forums. My recent interest in the issue has dragged me into numerous dialogues and debates with colleagues and counterparts from markets at different stages of evolution – in regions covered by the Expresso group as well as other regions. Very interesting insights have emerged from Greece, Tanzania, Indonesia, India and Kenya. Everyone is grappling with two fundamental questions:

1. What is a price war good for?

2. Who are the winners in a price war?

Price wars are usually started by an operator with an aggressive desire for increasing market share. This is exactly what happened in Greece when one of the operators decided to break the market equilibrium. Within three months all the market players had responded with counter offers. The result for the total market at the end of the year was a revenue decrease of 13%, a reduction of €500 million from an overall revenue of €4.7 billion. The impact of price wars is not contained within the mobile telecoms operators: governments feel the heat too, especially in economies with heavy dependency on telecoms taxes. In Tanzania, price wars amongst mobile phone operators have been blamed for reduction in value added tax (VAT) revenue collected during the early part of this year. According to the Bank of Tanzania's Monthly Economic Review of March, the impact was a reduction of 6.4%. As VAT is a function of spend, this implies a reduction in total spend by the population. Of course the operators have seen an overall increase in traffic, but this is clearly not compensating for the proportional price decrease. Asian markets are often compared with African regions for similarities in consumer behaviours. In addition to analysing the consumer behaviours in our own markets, we looked at the Indonesian telecoms market experience from the price wars of 2007; and India's most active period during 2009. Our review has shown that although these are different markets, there are many similarities in consumer behaviours during price wars.

The three major behavioural trends observed were as follows:

• High churn rates, especially the monthly rolling count

• Increased multi-SIM ownership

• Smart usage management leading to consumers getting more for less spend

In some markets the lead operator is so dominant that all the other players are loss-making entities. Often these smaller operators find themselves in a 'do-or-die' position: either to grow their loss-making businesses or to exit the market completely. In the last few months of 2010, the Kenyan mobile telecoms market experienced a lot of excitement and change. The market leader in Kenya with 78% market share was estimated to have 16 million subscribers; the competitor with two million subscribers was a loss-making operation. They took the decision to go with aggressive price cuts and call rates were dropped by 50%. The resultant gain in new customers was so substantial that the network's quality of service dropped significantly. In many industries the winner during a price war is always the consumer. In mobile telecoms the same can be said to be true, but only in the short term. During the early days of price wars the consumer reaps the most rewards. In the long run, in all the cases evaluated the sequence of events is very similar. There is increased traffic but a decrease in overall market revenues, congested networks lead to lower quality of service and poor user experience, more pressure for the operators to run leaner operations, reduced R&D and limited innovations. Eventually the losing operators quietly disappear. Competition is healthy in a market even in the form of intense price competition, but price wars without appropriate value analysis leads to prices that are not sustainable in the long run. In this type of price war everyone loses. A logical follow-on question is: what can operators and consumers do to avoid the detrimental price wars destroying markets? The answer to this question requires a discussion space of its own, perhaps in the near future.