VALUE-ADDED SERVICES
How MENA broke the bank The MENA region continues to go from strength to strength, with markets becoming ever-more lucrative and fraud falling. Paul Skeldon takes a look The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has become one of the biggest success stories of the mVAS and carrier billing markets in the past five years. A surge in use of the web – particularly over mobile – during the pandemic saw millions of consumers across the region turn on to just what fun there was to be had in digital entertainment. With many unbanked, carrier billing become the default for how they paid. Mobile internet penetration in the region continues to rise post-pandemic and is expected to surpass 350 million connections by 2023, according to Statista. This has also driven a surge in tech investment in the region, most notably in 5G, AI and cyber
security. 5G has become particularly popular in Saudi Arabi and the UAE since its initial limited roll out in 2019.
CONTENT IS KING
From a content point of view, the MENA market has embraced many of the tropes of other content and VAS markets elsewhere in the world, with sports, news, games and video entertainment all flying high. The most popular mobile games in the region are what you would expect; strategy, action and sims, together accounting for 63% of the market according to the MENA-3 Games Market Report 2022. However, hyper causual gaming is set to be the
most popular games category in the region going forward, according to Data.ai’s State of Mobile MENA 2023, growing 28% in a year and its 2.6 billion downloads accounting for 31% of all downloads. By contrast, simulation games account for around 18%. The esports market is a significant growth driver in the MENA gaming industry. The report highlights that 73% of gamers engage with esports in some capacity, with 14 million esports enthusiasts and 11 million esports gamers. Saudi Arabia has the highest revenue, and Egypt has the largest. As time as gone on, the market has also come to be defined by a raft of ‘localised’ services, many tapping into the particular tastes in the region – religious content and localised sports and even poetry and traditional stories.
Social media use in the region has also exploded, with five MENA nations already lying way above the global average of 59.3% for uptake of social. The UAE has 100% uptake, Bahrain 98.7%, Qatar 96.3% and Lebanon and Oman both on 90.5%. Financially, this is injecting a lot of money into the region, with GO-Globe data suggesting that internet ad spend in MENA’s top 14 social markets is worth $4.4bn in 2022. Apps too are extremely popular. Across 2022, app store spending in the region rose 10.3% year-on-year to $3.1 billion according to Data.ai’s State of Mobile MENA 2023 report. Daily time spent grew 3% to 4.5%, while new downloads increased a massive 45.7% to 13.8 billion - an average of 26,200 apps downloaded per minute.
‘Digital Corridor’ opens up MENA to rich content and telecoms services MENA telco Telecom Egypt has joined forces with Oman’s Zain Omantel, to create a new digital corridor connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf, creating an unprecedented Eurasian data highway. The innovative infrastructure will extend from Oman’s Arabian Sea and Gulf shores to Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline, employing a high fibre count, cutting-edge blend of terrestrial and subsea segments. The terrestrial segments, spanning Oman, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, promise unparalleled reliability and protection. On the other hand, the subsea section, directly linking Saudi Arabia and Egypt through the Red Sea, will feature a high-capacity, repeaterless cable system. The route design will provide Telecom Egypt and ZOI’s partners and customers with the best resiliency and reliability for their end-to-end solution. Furthermore, the infrastructure will be extended to Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq and Jordan through ZOI’s network and collaboration with the
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licensed cable landing parties in each country. This collaboration also offers a revolutionary opportunity for subsea cable owners. By connecting to this open access system, they can significantly reduce their construction costs and greatly enhance latency, resilience, and market response times. Telecom Egypt will develop new infrastructure across Egypt from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and onwards to Europe, complemented by ZOI’s robust infrastructure across the Middle East. This new network route will have the shortest, enhanced latency profile, giving hyperscalers, subsea cable providers, carriers and telecom operators improved connectivity options from the Indian Ocean to Europe. Mohamed Nasr, Managing Director and CEO at Telecom Egypt, comments: “We are excited to collaborate with ZOI on this strategic project; it’s a game-changer in the Eurasia route connectivity landscape. As we look for innovative ways to better serve our customers, we will consistently
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strive to provide a seamless international connectivity network and increase our diversity layers, without compromising quality, cost or speed. We will do this by leveraging on both Telecom Egypt’s established history in the subsea cables arena and its experienced and competent team.” Sohail Qadir, CEO at ZOI, adds: “We are delighted to partner with Telecom Egypt on such a ground-breaking project. ZOI was created to revolutionize the wholesale telecom scene and this is an example of what the future holds. We are facilitating the landing of subsea connections through our shareholders such as Omantel and Zain KSA being the licensees in those jurisdictions. This one-of-a-kind infrastructure will be expanded to most of ZOI’s network footprint to maximize the benefit to our group operations across the region. The value that this digital corridor will create is enormous and it will be widely realized in the region and beyond not only from a connectivity point of view, but also on technological, commercial and social levels.”
