IDG News Service —
Celtel Uganda is set to change its brand name from Celtel to Zain next month. The change in the Zain Group's Uganda operation is in line with the desire of the Kuwaiti-based group to operate under one global brand name.
Top officials of Celtel Uganda are meeting with their counterparts from Celtel Kenya in Nairobi, Kenya, (the headquarters of Zain's Africa operations) to work out the details of the name change rebranding.
There is no official confirmation about the developments yet from Celtel, but a source close to Celtel Uganda said the meeting started Wednesday and will continue through Friday.
"When the meeting ends on Friday, the Celtel Uganda officials will return to Kampala ready to make an official announcement, but that announcement will be made early next week," the source said.
The Zain Group (formerly MTC) is the majority owner of Celtel, the pan-African mobile phone firm, which it bought in 2005 for US$3.3 billion from Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim. Zain has since invested more than $6 billion in its African operations.
Celtel Uganda will join the company's 21 sister companies in Africa and the Middle East in adopting the brand name Zain. In February this year, Celtel Nigeria changed its name to Zain, while the announcement on the Kenya operation was made last September.
The latest rebranding exercise for Celtel Uganda comes just three years after the company changed its company logo and corporate colors from white and orange to the current red and yellow. The name change will again bring with it a new logo and new colors of black, purple and green.
The rebrand is expected to create special challenges in the market, considering that much has been invested in creating the Celtel brand. An advertising blitz is expected to drum the new name and corporate identity into the minds of consumers.
The decision to rebrand Celtel appears to be driven by the fact that MTN, Eitisalat and Vodacom -- its major rivals in the Africa/Middle East region -- are all operating under single brand names.
"Zain will bring together all our operations under a single, strong and unique identity," an earlier media report quotes Zain Group's CEO Saad Al Barrak, as saying. "We believe it is the optimal platform upon which we will build a global brand with the ultimate goal of serving our customers better."
