The name of the areeba mobile telephone service will soon change to MTN Ghana on your mobile phone if you are a subscriber to that brand.

The Corporate Service Executive of MTN Ghana, Miss Mawuena Dumor said that at a day's workshop called by the company to allow it to interact with journalists.

She said the change of brand name will happen because Mobile Telecommunications Network (MTN) has acquired Investcom Limited which owned Scancom (GH) Ltd. the operators of areeba.

Areeba was previously known as Spacefon.

The goal of the workshop according to Miss Dumor was two-fold: to formally introduce MTN to the media and secondly to establish with them a relationship that will enable the company serve its customers best while fulfilling its corporate responsibilities to the satisfaction of all.

Miss Dumor told the journalists that the corporate vision of MTN is to be the leading mobile services provider in emerging markets and Ghana is one of the latest countries where it has decided to come to do business and share its global experience with.

She said Investcom owned many telecom companies in West and Central Africa including Ghana, Benin, Cameroon and Uganda and when MTN bought out Investcom, it took all those companies into its MTN group global portfolio.

In Ghana, while the areeba brand will change to MTN Ghana, Scancom Ghana will still remain the registered owner of the brand, except that Scancom is now owned by the MTN group.

MTN was created in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1993 and has grown from a local to global mobile service company. In 1998 it had 4.1 million subscribers in South Africa but as at last year it had 50 million subscribers in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East.

It has 13 million subscribers in Nigeria, its largest market on the continent: 9 million in South Africa and 2.9 million in Ghana, its third largest market in Africa.

The corporate Communications manager of MTN Ghana, Alex Abiew also told journalists that Africa is today the fastest growing telecommunications environment in the world and it is also fast catching up with the rest of the world in mobile telephone and MTN is happy to be part of that growth, and is also interested in bringing global telecommunications to Ghana.

Source: The Independent