MTN Ghana CEO, Michael Ikpoki says the current state of Ghana’s telecom market poses a risk of unprofitability to any new entrant. He noted that the market already has more than 80% mobile penetration; multi-simming (people using more than one SIM card) is huge; and average revenue per user (ARPU) keeps dropping so a new entrant is likely to dilute the revenue of the existing operators but also face the risk of unprofitability in the long-run. Mr. Ikpoki was answering the question as to whether the market was ready for the recently licensed sixth operator, Glo Mobile, in an exclusive interview with Adom News Editor, Nii Narku Dowuona. He said the question of whether Glo was welcome into the Ghanaian market was no more relevant because it has been licensed, but the risks it poses for the market is a concern to existing operators, and whether it would succeed or not “time will tell.” “This business is very capital intensive and if a huge financial outlay is put into building capacity and making capital investment and you don’t have enough subscribers on your network to sustain the amount of investment made, what happens in the long-run is that you create a situation of unprofitability; and if a network is not profitable, the issue of expansion would be called into a serious question,” he said. He said he would not want to be too specific as to whether the sixth operator will succeed or not because at the end of the day the market place will decide that, adding “I don’t know what will happen in the next one year, two years or three years but the risk of unprofitability must be noted.” But he admitted that the coming of a new player is also good because it creates competition – it creates an opportunity for innovation and all the players now work harder and consumers benefit. “I think we must admit that competition has worked very well in the Ghanaian market – we have been able to attract big players into the market and subscribers have had the best benefit of it – but my point is that depending on the number of players in the market, depending on the capacity of the market, the other side to it is that the networks need to be reasonably profitable,” he said. Meanwhile Vodafone Boss, Kyle Whitehill is also on record as saying the market is not ready for a sixth operator and that with the sixth operator’s presence there would eventually be consolidations in the long-term, otherwise some players would collapse.