A UK-based telecommunication company, Lycamobile, has entered the Ugandan market.
The company is set to rival the already existing companies in Uganda that include MTN, Airtel and Uganda Telecom Ltd, among other smaller companies.
Lycamobile is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), selling international pay-as-you-go SIM cards to customers wanting to make international telephone calls.
Currently, Lycamobile operates in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and USA.
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The firm was founded in 2002 by a Sri Lanka-British citizen, Allirajah Subaskaran, and is estimated to have a net worth of two billion euros and boosts of 15 million customers across the globe.
In 2016, nearly twenty Lycamobile employees were arrested in France, with about half of them charged with money laundering.
As of June 2017, there were an estimated 20.4 million mobile subscribers out of an estimated population of 39.6 million; a 51.5 percent penetration rate. By March 2018, the number of mobile phone users had increased to 24.8 million, a 70.9 percent penetration rate.
MTN has the biggest market share at 46 percent followed by Airtel Uganda at 44 percent. Africell has a market share of 9 percent while the rest share the remaining 1percent.
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