Tigo Rwanda, a subsidiary of the Luxembourg-based Millicom International Cellular S.A says it has 12 percent of market share within seven months of their launch into the Rwandan market.

Tigo entered the Rwandan market last year after its parent company, Millicom, purchased the country’s third mobile network license for US$ 60 million.

"Rwanda showed a strong pick-up in momentum, with 259,000 customers added in the last three months. Overall, we expect customer intake to continue to be quite volatile, due to variable factors including the macro environment, seasonality, SIM card registration, competitor promotions and our own marketing activities,” the mobile operators said, Tuesday, in a press release.

The press release also indicates the group financial performance for the Millicom brand for the period ended June 30, this year.

While the company’s revenue in total went up by 14 percent to $929 million in three months, Tigo contributed $4 million (Rwf2.4 billion) of revenues between March-June in 2010.

The parent company says the Rwanda brand is "continuing to develop in line with our expectations”.

"We continue to invest heavily in Africa to capitalize on the growth potential and to address the likely increase in traffic as tariffs continue to decline.”

Commenting on the results, Mikael Grahne, the Millicom President and Chief Executive Officer observed that the Group has made continued good progress in the second quarter.

"Our customer market share continues to increase… In Africa, we have maintained a good rate of growth and are outperforming our competitors,” he said.

In Africa, Millicom’s customers increased by 34 percent with 1.3 million net add in the quarter.

The best performing markets in terms of customer growth were Central Africa country of Chad which grew by 53 percent year-on-year, DRC 44 percent and Tanzania 43 percent – which also operate under the Tigo brand.

Rwanda’s Utility and Regulatory Agency (RURA) is seeking to issue a fourth license by the end of this year.

But according to the regulator’s policy, Tigo must first acquire about 300,000 subscribers then the bidding process for another operator will be issued out. Rwanda expects to hit 6 million mobile subscribers by 2015.

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