Tigo driving Senegalese mobile market

Senegal was home to more than 1,729,000 mobile phone users at the end of 2005, up from 1,120,000 the previous year, with much of the growth attributed to Millicom-owned Tigo’s aggressive marketing and promotional campaigns, which have prompted incumbent Sonatel Mobiles to slash prices itself. For a long time Sonatel Mobiles enjoyed little or no effective competition, but this all changed in 2005 and the newly re-branded Millicom-owned Tigo has emerged as a viable competitor to the France Telecom-controlled unit. During the first nine months of 2005, Tigo added 278,000 subscribers compared to Sonatel’s 138,000. The MIC-backed comapny ended the year with 679,914 customers, up from 339,000 in December 2004. Tigo was also first to launch GPRS in November 2005 – beating its rival to launch by a full month.