By Golnar Motevalli

KABUL, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Mobile banking and tapping younger markets have boosted one of Afghanistan's largest telecoms firm's customers by more than 1 million people in the last six months alone, the company said on Thursday.

Landline cover is almost non-existent in Afghanistan, a result of three decades of war.

"Afghanistan is one of the highest priorities in terms of investment ... people are still looking to invest and telecoms is really the only success story we have right now," Altaf Ladak, Chief Operating Officer of Roshan, told Reuters.

Active subscribers increased to about 3.1 million, from 2 million, between June and December 2008, Ladak said, driven by the introduction of mobile banking, discounted friends and family packages and tariffs which target the younger end of the market.

Roshan, which has coverage in more than 226 cities and a 46 percent share of the market, reached a "tipping point" of fast growth whereby the "entry barriers have come down to a point where it's very easy for people to buy a sim card," Ladak added.

Roshan is part owned by France's Monaco Telecom International, a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless <CW.L>, and Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera <TLSN.ST>, while the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development owns a 51 percent stake, investing all its profits in development projects across Afghanistan.

THRIVING SECTOR

Billions of dollars of aid are pumped into Afghanistan each year to rebuild the country's crumbling infrastructure and while private enterprise is encouraged by the government, the country ranks very low on the World Bank's "doing business" index.

The telecoms sector has flourished since the 2001 fall of the Taliban and big regional players such as the United Arab Emirates' Etisalat <ETEL.AD> have recently entered the market.

"They have deep pockets and have spent quite a bit of money over the past two to three years," Ladak said, adding that Roshan, which is Afghanistan's largest tax payer, still had room on its balance sheet last year to invest $85 million in network infrastructure, despite the financial crisis.

Ladak said the only anticipated knock-on affect of the credit crunch on Roshan's business would come from a decrease in money repatriated to Afghanistan from Afghans living abroad, which will impact how much money people can spend locally.

Ladak said Roshan's last publicly available financial statement showed a $200 million annual profit and he was upbeat about growth, anticipating "a strong market" in the next two years at least. (Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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