From Sonny Aragba-Akpore, Dar Es-Salam, Tanzania

Besides, the Kuwait-based company may soon make Lagos, Nigeria its operational hub for all its networks in the Middle East and Africa. Nigeria is the company's 15th country of operation.

Celtel International bought 65 per cent equity in Vmobile three months ago for about N150 billion ($1.005 billion) to become the Nigerian company's core investor. The new majority shareholders will among other things, take over the management and change the name Vmobile to Celtel Nigeria.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Celtel International, Mr. Marten Pieters, told visiting Nigerian reporters to Dar Es-Salaam, Tanzania at the weekend that Nigeria was the 15th country where it had operations in Middle East and Africa. He added that with Nigeria, "we hope to become Africa's number one mobile telephones operator, in the next five years."

He said that the company plans to build a network profile of about 150 million customers in the next five years with Nigeria alone having 50 million.

"We want to build a truly pan-African network and Nigeria will be the hub." Pieters, flanked by Celtel, Tanzania, Managing Director, Mr. Steve Torode, said.

Pieters also pledged that there would be no job losses. Indeed, he praised the Nigerian managers of the company for a job well done, saying: "We are very proud now that we are majority shareholders of Vmobile and we are absolutely convinced that you will help us a lot in further building our company throughout Africa."

Celtel has its operational base in Kuwait where MTC-Celtel holds sway while its administrative headquarters remains in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

He admitted that Vmobile had had a very troubled history.

"That is why I think it is so good that the company now has reached a safe harbour and is in a good family. But of course now, entering into the family means that you have to adopt the family name. What we see in Nigeria so far is that Vmobile has done a very good job in promoting its brand-Vmobile. It is a strong brand. But there is also a lot of proof in the industry that if you have a strong brand, you can build on that brand equity and change it into another brand. Let me give you a few examples. Vodafone started out with only one licence and now it is all over the world. They started from scratch with only a few licences. They bought quite a few licences and they rebranded them all. Orange did the same thing. Orange bought a lot of companies and rebranded them into orange operations."

"Vmobile has become a member of the Celtel family, so it has to adopt the Celtel name," he said.

Pieters said that the intention of the new Celtel in Nigeria was to ensure telephone penetration to all parts of the country.

"Our target is the mass market where people cannot afford $100 per month. We hope to crash tariffs to a manageable level where the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) may drop to below $25 per month.

"These are good customers because we are guaranteed of their patronage," he said.

Pieters explained that "there are lower average revenue per users. That is what you have everywhere. The people that need the phones the most will be the first ones to buy them. In 1987 in the Democratic Republic of Congo then called Zaire, where the first mobile phone calls were made, they paid about $3000 for a handset and about $1,000 a month for subscription fees for the calls; and they were very happy to do that because they needed the service. If I were a diamond trader and I made $3 million per year, then, I don't care about these bills, and that is the reality."

He continued:"What we now see is that we get into the mass market and the mass market of course, is normal people that cannot afford to have telephone bills of $100 per month. But, that does not mean that they are not good customers. They are still good customers to us because even someone that uses $10 per month can still be a good customer. And in Nigeria there are so many people out there, and that is the attraction."

Pieters said that in reality, tariffs are relatively higher in Nigeria than other countries of its operations in Middle East and Afrca because while operators have access to common international gateways, they have to build individual facilities in Nigeria.

"There is no monopoly of international gateways and that actually keeps the tariffs high. And that's what we are having here (Tanzania). There was no competition in international traffic because it was monopolised into the fixed line operators. That has changed. The market has opened. And then you see that competition starts and then you are able to drop the tariffs because you don't have to go through the monopoly that actually keeps the tariff very high and then every mobile operator sitting behind him can do nothing else than also to keep the tariffs high. That is the situation here. But in Nigeria you already have a different situation because there is already competition on the international traffic."

"First of all, building a mobile network is an art. Though it is scientific and a technology-driven thing, the reality is that it is very much dependent on the quality of the people that are working on it. So you see differences on the quality of the networks. The other issue is that if you purchase a piper aircraft for instance and it carries four passengers. Now what we do with the mobile networks is that during the flight we construct that little aircraft into a Boeing 747 which is a big jumbo jet because we have to add passengers during the flight and we can't go down and stop and put the plane in a hanger for the weeks and say we are going to add some extra chairs. But you can imagine if you reconstruct your piper in the air into Boeing 747, that is quite a difficult task and something might go wrong."

Celtel is interested in unified licensing. "We are interested in united licensing. In the end, everybody will have a unified licence. That is the whole philosophy about the unified licences. It is a very good direction, we think, in the licensing process because what happened in the past was that governments, regulators would give licences based on a certain technology, which in a way is a little bit funny because the technology is actually not interesting for the customer. The customer is interested in the service. Let us take our main product, which is still simply the voice call. I think you as a user of a mobile phone are not very interested if your voice call travels over a 900 frequency or 1800 frequency or something in between. I don't think you are interested in that. So, it is a little bit funny if you as a government say that 'okay, you can do voice service to a company but you can only do it on this technology."

"Governments are now moving from that. So what they would do would be to say, okay, you can do a service and you pick the best technology. And the best technology today, might be very different from the best technology five years from now. And we see that in the industry."

But he has his reservations on unified licences. "Don't expect too much from it. That is the down-side. People get excited because it is unified licensing. In the end, what limits the number of operators for example, that do mobile telephony, is not the number of licences, the thing is the availability of frequencies and that is a very limited thing."

He added:"United licensing is good but, at the same time, you must not see it as magic that will change the whole industry because that won't happen. It's a kind of natural evolution, a kind of natural growth path that we are going through."