Authorities in Ghana were tipped to announce minimum and maximum pricing for mobile money and connectivity services, as part of an attempt to increase competition to market leader MTN.

Reuters and a number of national newspapers reported new government policies were being prepared to curb the position of MTN Ghana across voice, data and mobile money services.

Speculation on the content of new policies come after Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) announced it was set to declare MTN as a “dominant/significant market power”.

GSMA Intelligence mobile connection figures for Q1 estimate MTN’s market share at 53 per cent, with 20.7 million. This compares with 8.8 million for Vodafone Ghana and AirtelTigo’s 8.1 million. No other market player registered more than 1 million connections.

However, in terms of users with data connections, NCA statistics put MTN’s share at close to 68 per cent for the period.

Although no official market share statistics are available for the country’s mobile money sector, MTN declared it had 9.1 million active subscribers in its 2019 annual report.

Bank of Ghana statistics for the same period said there were a total of 14.5 million registered active accounts across the country. However, definitions of how often accounts need to be used to be considered active vary by provider and authority.