Morocco to liberalise fixed telecom services

April 11, 2002 – As reported by Reuters, Morocco plans to liberalize fixed-line telecommunications services in the second half of 2002 to ensure full coverage of the country, a senior regulatory official said on Wednesday.

"We finally got the green light for the liberalisation of fixed telecoms services this year," Mostafa Terrab, chief of telecoms watchdog Agence Nationale de Reglementation des Telecoms (ANRT), told Reuters.

Morocco will be the first country in the region to liberalise fixed phone and data services, Terrab added.

With a population of 30 million, Maroc Telecom, the state-run telecom operator has only 1.2 million fixed-line subscribers. In 2001, multimedia company Vivendi Universal bought a 35 percent share of Maroc Telecom for $2.2 billion. It may purchase a further 16 percent, which would give it majority ownership, a telecom market analyst said.

The regulator had initially set November 2001 as the launch date for liberalisation of the sector, but the government postponed the decision until April 2002 for unknown reasons. Terrab said that ANRT will consult the interested operators soon to determine the appropriate time to begin the bidding process. Morocco will grant a fixed-line license to a local or foreign operator by the end of the year at the latest, he added. The Rabat-based regulator is expected to announce the final liberalisation calendar on April 25, ANRT experts said.

Morocco opened up the GSM mobile sector in 1999 by granting Spanish-led consortium Telefonica a mobile phone license for $1.1 billion. Since the launch of Telefonica services in Morocco, the number of mobile phone subscribers has jumped to nearly 5 million in 2002, from 500,000 in 1999. Analysts expect the number of subscribers to fixed-line services, mainly businesses, will surge in the coming years due to increased competition.

"Morocco's telecoms sector has a potential for rapid growth... and the sector is expected to attract multi-million-dollar investment projects in the future, mainly from foreign firms," a European banker said.