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TOUCHAHEART – In a landmark ruling, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) Tribunal has imposed a N150 million fine on Multichoice, owners of DStv and Gotv, for unjustly increasing subscription fees without adequate notice to customers. Background of the Case The FCCPC had accused Multichoice of violating consumer rights by hiking prices without a one-month notice,…

IDC Telecom Services Tracker Finds Accelerated Growth Due to Inflation but the Future Remains Shadowed by the Looming Recession. NEEDHAM, Mass., November 04, 2022 - Worldwide spending on telecommunications and pay TV services will be nearly $1.6 trillion in 2022, representing a year-over-year increase of 1.9%, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Telecom Services Tracker. The latest forecast is a bit more optimistic than the version published in May as it assumes growth in total market value will be 0.5 percentage points higher. IDC believes that this positive movement is a consequence of inflation (i.e., the increase in tariffs for telecommunication services). As a result of the inflationary pressures that have started to threaten their profitability, telecom operators have recently started to increase the tariffs for their services. A simple analogy indicates that the higher tariffs mean clients are paying more, and the total nominal value of the market is growing faster than previously expected. This trend is common across all global regions and has caused similar changes in their respective revenue forecasts for 2022: the growth in the Americas was increased by 0.3 percentage points, in Asia/Pacific by 0.5 percentage points, and in EMEA by 0.9 percentage points. The increase in EMEA comes mostly from Europe, a region that is witnessing higher-than-average inflation while struggling to find a replacement for cheap Russian energy. Still, the fastest revenue growth this year is expected in the Asia/Pacific region, driven by the relatively lower saturation of the telco markets in less-developed countries. Global Regional Telecoms and Pay TV Services Revenue and Year-on-Year Growth (revenues in $B) Global Region2021 Revenue2022 Revenue*2022/2021 Growth*Americas$579$5861.2%Asia/Pacific$504$5162.3%EMEA$478$4892.3%Total$1,561$1,5911.9%Source: IDC Worldwide Semiannual Services Tracker - 1H 2022 With the tariff increases, most of the operators have initially focused on the mobile section of the market, lifting the average prices by a high-single-digit percentage. This has been done because the mobile section represents a major part of every telco market, so the outcome of such action is visible sooner; and in the fixed segment, and especially in its B2B portion, there is typically a high proportion of customers with multi-year contracts that cannot be broken without penalties. Consequently, our forecast for mobile services spending in 2022 has been increased by 0.7 percentage points, above the average for the overall market.