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Dr Ryan Hawthorne is a director of Acacia Economics and is an economist working on competition and economic regulation. His focus areas include competition/antitrust economics and the economics of telecommunications regulation.
Ryan has led the economic analysis of a range of telecommunications regulation projects in a number of countries, including the market enquiry into mobile broadband for the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), and the recent spectrum licensing valuation and invitation to apply for ICASA. Ryan has also led the economic analysis for a number of major competition cases for Acacia as well as in his role at the Competition Commission of South Africa, including in the telecommunications, dairy, news media, forestry, grocery retail and automotive components sectors. Ryan has also worked on a number of competition and regulation matters in the telecommunications sector, including in leading the economic analysis for the margin squeeze complaint against the fixed line incumbent in South Africa, Telkom, and leading key aspects of investigations relating to wholesale access to mobile networks in a number of countries. He has also been engaged in strategy development in the telecommunications sector.
Prior to this he worked at Neotel, a large telecommunications provider (now Liquid Telecom) in a number of capacities including leading projects on expanding broadband networks. Before working at Neotel, he was a senior economist at the Competition Commission of South Africa. This followed work as an economic expert on competition cases with the specialist economic consultancy Johannesburg Economics, of which he was a founder.
Ryan holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cape Town, a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a BBusSc (Hons), University of Cape Town. He has presented a number of papers at conferences and has several publications.