Qatar's telecommunications sector is becoming increasingly competitive, both domestically and on the international stage.
The recently released Global Competitiveness Report 2009-10, prepared by the World Economic Forum (WEF), ranked Qatar as the most competitive economy in the Middle East and North Africa region, and 22nd overall out of the 133 countries assessed.
The country scored highly in the category of technological readiness, the ability of an economy to adopt existing technologies to enhance productivity. In particular, the WEF cited Qatar's embrace of new communications technology as a factor that enhanced its competitiveness, saying, "The country has made great strides in harnessing the latest technologies, such as mobile telephony and broadband."
Those great strides have seen Qatar ranked second in the world for per-capita mobile phone ownership, 37th for broadband internet subscriptions and 33rd for the total number of internet users.
While the willingness of Qataris to make use of the latest technological advances has helped to improve the country's economic competitiveness at the international level, it is on the domestic stage where things are really heating up.
On March 1, a new era dawned, with Vodafone Qatar launching a limited mobile phone service, thus marking the end of Qtel's monopoly on the market. Full services covering around 99% of the country were launched in July.
Not surprisingly, Vodafone Qatar has experienced some teething problems, partly due to having to share some of Qtel's infrastructure and in part as a result of the unexpectedly high levels of client pick up. In mid-September, Vodafone Qatar announced it passed the 100,000 subscriber mark. Though well ahead of the company's own projections, and a good start towards its target of taking a 40 to 60% market share within 10 years, Vodafone Qatar still has a long way to go before it can truly rival Qtel, which has 1.9m subscribers on its books.
Despite having just a fraction of Qtel's subscriber numbers, Vodafone has set out its stall, seeking to challenge the incumbent with different products and pricing packages. And it is the appeal of the new that is attracting at least some of Qtel's existing customers to its rival, with the two companies basically providing similar services on mobile and internet platforms. Both companies have reduced costs for some mobile phone services and stepped up special offers, including cut-price internet downloads and cheap international calls.
