KABUL, April 9: Tucked into a turban, slipped into a suit or hidden under a burqa — the mobile phone has become an essential item for more than one million Afghans in the country’s top economic success story. At the end of 2001, when the Taliban government was toppled and Afghanistan was in ruins after 25 years of war, there were just two fixed telephone lines for every 1,000 people.

Four years and more than 250 million dollars of private investment later, about 1.1 million people — close to five per cent of the population — have registered with one of Afghanistan’s two mobile phone companies, Roshan and AWCC, whose networks cover more than half of the country.

“The success has been faster than expected,” says Telecommunications Minister Amirzai Sangin. “It took five years to reach five per cent of the population: in India and Pakistan, it took 10 years.”

“In the next five years, we should be at 10 or 12 per cent of the population,” adds Altaf Ladak, marketing director for Roshan, which has in two years become the top network with 750,000 clients compared to 400,000 for AWCC.

The mobile phone explosion has spurred on the development of Afghan business in big cities. It has also overloaded the network; it often takes several attempts to put through a call, and being cut off is commonplace.

But the boom has made telecoms the leading private sector in the country, contributing to between 10 and 20 per cent of gross domestic product.

And it is one of the biggest employers, directly providing work to 10,000 people in a country with a largely agriculture-based economy.

It is also an important source of income for the Afghan government.

“The telecom sector brought us (last year) 100 million dollars, which is about a third of government revenues,” Sangin says. The amount includes 40 million dollars from the issuing of a third licence and 60 million in taxes.

“No other sector makes that much money in Afghanistan today,” adds a ministry official, who speaks of profits “in the order of 10 per cent”.

The thirst to communicate after years of war that scattered Afghanistan’s population across the world explains a large part of the success.

“Seven to eight million Afghans left the country not long ago. Their desire to reestablish contact with their families has carried the sector,” says Emmanuel de Dinechin, from Roshan partner Altai.

Today there are between one million to several million minutes of international calls placed from Afghanistan every day, according to government estimates, with about 500,000 minutes of incoming calls.

Prices are high however for most Afghans, the majority of whom live on less than two dollars a day. A new handset costs at least 50 dollars, a SIM card about 25 dollars and a prepaid phone card runs at least five dollars.

The costs explain the success of public phone shops set up by Afghans who own one or two mobile phones.

The rate for making calls is more affordable, even though it is more expensive than in Pakistan. Here a call is about five afghani (10 cents) a minute for a local connection and between 30 and 100 for an international one.

But the costs are expected to drop by half in the next four years, says Sangin.

This is in part because two more mobile phone networks will enter the market. The first new licence went to Lebanese company Investcom, which is due to start operating in the coming months.

“The lack of competition and excuses from the government, which is a minor shareholder of AWCC, are keeping prices high,” says an expert in the sector.

“But with two new licences, the cost of a SIM card should drop to five to 10 dollars between now and the end of 2006,” he says.—AFP