Country profile: Algeria

Algeria’s economy has been growing but remains exposed. Growth is expected to recover in 2024, with GDP rebounding from a 5% decline in 2020 but has not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Investment growth is expected to remain robust while inflation declines gradually in 2024-25, but a reliance on volatile hydrocarbon exports has impacted the Algerian Dinar which has a –1.7 average annual depreciation vs the US$. There are an estimated tower count towers in the country of which 20% are ground based and the rest are rooftop or alternative site typologies. Mobilis has the largest portfolio with around 7,500 sites, followed by Djezzy with 6,500 and Ooredoo with 7,100. State owned broadcaster, Télédiffusion d’Algerie (TDA) has 350 towers.

All MNOs have good 3G reach at around 92% for 3G, but competition for the 4G market is driving demand for additional network capacity. Djezzy leads the market with 80%, followed by Ooredoo at 75.6% and Mobilis with 68.6%. With many sites lacking the structural capacity for multiple tenants and MNOs failing to agree site sharing swaps, less than 2% of sites are currently shared.R egulators have been unpredictable; active sharing policy in 2016 saw Ooredoo and Djezzy colocating on around 1,000 sites before the policy was reversed, only to start asking for overlapping sites to be decommissioned more recently. The Algerian government is now prioritising national 4G LTE with Djezzy investing heavily in 3/4G network expansion as well as testing 5G in partnership with Huawei and Nokia. A commercial 5G launch has been in the works since 2022 but has yet to launch. Ooredoo however has tasked Nokia with preparing its network to be 5G-ready.

TASC Towers is in the process of acquiring Ooredoo Algeria’s 7,100 towers as part of the regional Ooredoo/ Zain/TASC merger. As a first-mover, numerous regulatory hurdles will need to be cleared before the deal completes. But once finalised, TASC Towers is left in a strong position to further consolidate the market and will be incentivized to as Ooredoo’s current tenancy ratio sits at just 1.01x. In terms of site operations, 99% of sites are on grid with generators used for backup on core sites.