Telecom Egypt said on Wednesday it has signed a multi-year agreement with Mada Communications to be its “preferred strategic provider” for international application-to-person (A2P) messaging services.
Under the deal, Mada will spearhead the management for all international A2P messaging services for Telecom Egypt, including functions such as two-factor authentication and automated notifications.
Telecom Egypt said it will leverage Mada’s capabilities to “deliver a superior experience to its growing customer base while simultaneously maximizing A2P messaging revenues.”
Telecom Egypt also said it picked Mada because of its regional expertise in Middle East North Africa, its network of local and international partnerships, its robust security and protection measures, and its platform’s seamless compatibility with Telecom Egypt’s existing systems.
Telecom Egypt, MD and CEO Mohamed Nasr said the A2P messaging deal with Mada “reinforces our commitment to promoting unorthodox business practices and expanding our business scope, which will contribute to achieving sustainable revenue growth and delivering added value to our customers”.
A2P messaging is generally forecast to be a growing market – albeit a relatively modest one – regionally and globally. Business Market Insights says it expects the A2P messaging and CPaaS market in Middle East and Africa to grow from US$2.7 billion in 2022 to US$3.7 billion by 2028, a CAGR of just 5%. India-based market analyst MarkNtel Advisors is forecasting a CAGR of 4.2% for A2P messaging in MEA from 2023 to 2028.
Those figures are more or less in line with global trends. Polaris Market Research says the global A2P messaging will be worth almost US$105 billion by 2032, at a CAGR of 4.7%. Juniper Research says global operator revenue from business SMS traffic (which includes A2P messaging) will grow by only 5% this year, down from 23% growth in 2023.
Juniper credits the drop to SMS price increases, and warns that operators will lose US$3.1 billion in business messaging revenue to OTT messaging channels over the next five years unless they work out a sustainable pricing model or turn to technologies like open APIs to keep messaging traffic inside their respective ecosystems.
