All over the world, telecommunication is growing and nations are taking advantage of ICT to improve their economy. There is a tremendous growth of the telecoms industry in Africa as the continent is gradually improving on infrastructure to enhance its steady growth in the region.

Tunisia and Ghana are in the midst with Mauritius as the leading African countries in telecoms maturity as seen from the new index from BuddeComm.

BuddeComm has launched the Telecoms Maturity Index (TMI) to analyze fixed lines, broadband and mobile markets of a country with a range of economic indices.

The rankings which are based on a scale of 1 to 100 compare points with other countries in the region.

From the recently released report on top African rankings, Mauritius is leading Africa with a TMI of 43. Ghana comes second with a Telecoms Maturity Index of 32 while Tunisia is third with 31.

Mauritius’ high score can be attributed to the country’s growing tourism market that has impacted positively on telecoms and the broadband sector.

DSL infrastructure has been extended in the country and telecom operators have increased fiber-based services in many locations.

Mobile telecoms are arguably the popular services around Africa. Over 90% telephone lines on the continent are mobile-based. For the poor situation of fixed-line infrastructure in many markets, mobile internet access is equally dominant with over 95% of the populace using mobile internet connection.

The varied market penetration in Africa can be attributed to the scope and size of the diverse market in the African region.

In early 2018 the biggest mobile penetration was seen in countries such as Gabon with 163%, South Africa with 147%, Botswana with 159% and Mauritius with 146%.

New reports showed the intensity of high penetration depicts the popularity of telecoms service consumers having more than one SIM cards in spite of effort from most regulators to enforce measures by which service providers must register SIM card users on their network.

The Growth Of Telecoms In Tunisia

Tunisia has maintained a competitive position in telecoms growth in Africa. Tunisia represents the face of telecom’s growth by dominating in the North Africa region. It occupies a comfortable third position in the whole of the African region.

On the backdrop of the rankings in Africa, a wide range of initiatives is been put in place to facilitate development in the sector. A plan has been rolled out to move Tunisia’s telecoms forward towards achieving the laid out target for the sector.

In a bid to improve access to the services, real estate developers and operators of telecoms services will be made to see it a duty to make sure planned building constructions have included fiber optic infrastructure in such designs.

In the release of the Tunisia Broadband Strategy (TBS) in September 2012, it drew out the government plans to speed up growth in the ICT sector via a wide scope of measures including mobile broadband penetration, driving up fixed lines and improving fiber optics (FO) capacity.

Towards achieving the targeted plans, encouraging healthy competition among service providers (ISPs), increasing levels of ICT literacy, working to top broadband penetration rate in the region, ensuring low cost for services to meet the needs of the country form the notable measures considered necessary to facilitate faster growth in the nation’s telecoms sector.

With Tunisia recording a good 5.1% fixed-line broadband penetration in 2011, the National Telecommunication, INT is hoping to jack it up to a high of 60% by 2020.

ICT has played a major role in Tunisia’s economy. The industry already accounts for 5% of the country’s GDP. This encourages the government to look more closely into the sector to make it better.

The measures put in place by the government’s strategy shows their readiness to keep the sector active with more efforts given to infrastructural development.

TBS calls for compulsory cooperation on infrastructure installation, calling on authorities to improve efficiency, encouraging companies to focus more on infrastructure towards developing new services and products. With efforts toward improving fixed broadband infrastructure towards enhancing primary fiber optics capacity, the TBS aims to build a strong fiber optics backbone by integrating existing telecom networks.

A major aspect of the strategic plan on sharing of fixed infrastructure was a pledge to put an end to the Tunisie Telecom’s monopoly on fixed-line voice services. This will increase competition and which invariably will result in bringing innovation and driving the cost of telecoms services downward.

Telecoms Growth In Ghana

Ghana is notably one of the first countries in the African region to deregulate and liberalize its telecoms sector. After Ghana Telecoms was privatized in 1996, a rapid growth in the market was clearly visible.

The competition was observed in the internet and mobile sectors. Many service providers were licensed to provide quality services.

In 2009, Vodafone Group acquired Ghana Telecoms and became known as Vodafone Ghana. Vodafone was the primary fixed-line provider and as well, the third largest service provider behind MTN and the merged AirtelTigo. Ghana’s second national operator Westel was equally reprivatized in 2007 to become Airtel Ghana in 2007.

Many submarine fiber cables are entering the country and have significantly improved international bandwidth and lowered the cost of internet services.

The Roll Out a National Fiber Backbone Network adds to the development in the sector by completely bringing new life to the country’s broadband market and open doors to the convergence of technologies and services. The country’s regulatory sector are optimistic of universal access licenses to provide both mobile and fixed line services to replace the 2G license that is bound to expire in 2019.

A major development in the Ghana telecoms revolution includes Accra Digital Center, world’s most viable online company, Google’s construction of a 1,200km metro-net fiber as one of its project link programs in the regions of the country and the planned launch of Ghanasat 1 satellite in 2020.

Others are the launch of the fifth international submarine fiber optic cable, Setting up of the Ghana information Communication Technology Council set up to guide the ICT sector and the increasing growth of fixed-mobile technology.

Tunisia and Ghana telecoms are no push overs in African telecoms services. The sector will continuously see more growth in years to come if efforts on improving infrastructure are not relaxed. Also read to know why an analyst of International Crisis Group stated ‘Tunisia is seen as the land of recruitment for terrorist’.

The Amazon should ring a bell to everybody who shops online. It opens doors for people to create their own stores while also making theirs alongside.

You can call it a monster e-commerce platform that everybody all the world will find a service or the other they are looking for.

Hitting the $1 trillion market value mark should just be appropriate considering the volume of activities on the company’s site.

First, it was Apple hitting the $1 trillion milestone to occupy the first position as the company with the highest market value. Recently in early September, Amazon did the same to become the second company in the US with the highest market capitalization.

As of October 23, 2009, the shares of the company reached $100. On October 27, 2017, the share value of the company has hit $1, 000 and just less than a year later; each share value went past the $2, 000 threshold on August 30, 2018.

It’s all been a great achievement that the founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos will be proud of and finding himself in the class of Bill Gates and other great men in the world who have made lots of money from their company.

Apple made the $1 trillion threshold weeks before Amazon achieved the same feat. Their high-in demand devices got them to speed in adding more value to their shares.

Today, Amazon has leveled up with Apple to have achieved this feat that may not be thought of in some years back as achievable in the shortest possible time they all did.

To get to this level, shares of the company increased to a high of $2,050.50 on a Tuesday morning to hit the $1 trillion mark before falling back to close at $2, 039.51 to exit the $1 trillion threshold market value.

What Amazon Put In To Achieve?

Amazon remains the topmost e-commerce giant in the world. To get to the level they did in just a couple of months shows a lot more was put to work.

Analysts were of the opinion that the many diversifications of the company are most likely to be responsible for the surge in the company’s shares. Just in 2017, Amazon entered into the grocery business by acquiring Whole Foods Markets.

The company is also working frantically on its logistics and hardware segments. It has worked on advertising to challenge the likes of Google and Facebook.

They’ve always shown investors they are capable of causing dramatic changes and make a profit in very rare areas of investment.

They added web services which have grown as far as 50% within the second quarter.

Exploring New Grounds

The Amazon investment strategy has no bounds. They are popular for online retail but they’ve taken it further up by exploring other areas of opportunities.

According to the CEO, some have led to a dead end but the most of them bring the explosion they’ve wanted to the Amazon brand. The current feat in Amazon reaching the $1trn threshold can also be traced to the success the company recorded in cloud computing.

The diversification drive of Amazon has not been limited to some investment opportunities alone. In fact, they go to the extent of exciting customers and investors on their new additions to expand the brand the more.

Amazon today sells anything you can think of even computing space to the smallest of home items and services.

This it has successfully done with assistance from its over 500, 000 employees to reach a profit of $178 billion annually.

People who are familiar with the brand won’t forget so soon how they started to offer people new ways to buy books online. They kept the excitement going with books by introducing the Kindle e-books and then came up with an interesting way to publish books online. They introduced Amazon Prime to bring innovation to how people get deliveries.

They launched into the tech world with Alexa, Fire, and others. Amazon is involved in Hollywood to make its movies and currently working on using drones to bring new ways to deliveries of its orders.

The company continues to evolve through the innovative mindset of the administrators to keep the drive going.

Behind Amazon’s successes are a dogged commitment and strong ambition to reach beyond where others will naturally feel they’ve reached the peak of their success. According to Jeff, they like to go down to unexplored alleys to discover what is at the end.

The company is committed to satisfying the commitment of their loyal consumers. Amazon is indeed a strong value addition to the US economy.