Pan African mobile operator ECONET Wireless Holdings Limited’s target to achieve 1,2 million subscribers by February 2009 in Zimbabwe is still on track despite the harsh economic conditions in the country.
The Herald said this confirmation was made by the Chief Executive, Douglas Mboweni when he presented the group’s unaudited interim financial results for the six months ended 31 August 2008 in Harare this week.
The newspaper Econet’s subscriber base grew by 41 percent to close the period under review at 910,047.
This was mainly due to the availability of additional network capacity from the current phase of the network expansion programme.
Revenue for the six-month period under review was Z$483 million in historical terms up from Z$4,664 million in February.
In the trading period, Econet posted a net profit of Z$16,1 billion (revalued) on the back of fair value adjustments, which surged from Z$217 to Z$20,2 billion.
Revenue went up from Z$80 to Z$483 million.
The company declared an interim dividend of Z$32,20 while basic earnings per share closed the period at Z$95,90
The group recorded a loss from operations of Z$274,3 million with the company noting that the sub-economic tariffs were impacting on operations.
Mr Mboweni said the unrealistic and uneconomic tariff regime is the single largest area, which is crippling the business.
“Despite the increase in subscribers and usage, revenue growth was not significant due to low tariffs, in real terms that prevailed during the period,”
“Tariffs have been consistently less than 1US cent over the six month period in comparison to the regional average tariff of 20US cents”, Mr Mboweni said.
He said the International Calling Card is a new product that will generate foreign currency to the business.
“We have been given the go-ahead to sell the SIM cards, air time and Internet products in foreign currency during the Comesa summit.
The card is available in US dollar, Rand and the British pound denominations, and can be used on all three Econet packages; Libertie, Business Partna and Buddie.
The business is continuing with the upgrade of its network infrastructure in the Southern region.
Most of the critical sites on the network have also been connected to power back-up generators in an effort to reduce congestion due to load shedding.
ZTE Corporation of China and Ericsson of Sweden are the major suppliers of network expansion equipment and we got most of our funding from the China Development Bank.
