Telecel has consolidated its position as Zimbabwe’s second largest mobile phone operator based on subscribers after reporting a phenomenal growth of one million users to 2,5 million between January and December last year.
By Fidelity Mhlanga
Telecel’s Chief Commercial Officer Ashraf El Guindy attributed the growth in subscribers to the company’s manifold promotions to attract customers over the last year.
Ashraf said besides a series of promotions such as the Win Big promotion, where callers can receive prizes that range from cellphone handsets to cars, the surging of the growth was influenced by services such as low international calling price to selected countries at $0,19/minute from the second minute and the Telecel Emergency Credit Service where prepaid customers can borrow airtime when they run out of credit and pay back when they recharge.
Among services Telecel is offering are voice calls at affordable rates in Zimbabwe on its network by offering 100% bonus airtime on all Telecel recharge cards. Customers can also use the co-branded opera-mini browser to browse the internet at lower rates due to the data compression ability of the service.
“We have an objective to bring value to subscribers and satisfaction to achieved class, confidence, good rapport building and creating customer loyalty,” El Guindy said.
Under Telecel’s Win Big Promotion which is running from 19 December to March 17, the company this week gave away the first of five VW Polos and twenty–four Samsung Galaxy S2 handsets.
If telecel is at 2.5 million with econet announcing 8 million last week (assuming these are not sim cards sold but active lines), add to that the net one numbers, then zim is almost 90 plus % of mobile phone usage. ummmmmmm, wondering the economics and spillover effects of it.
assuming each of their customer sends one SMS a day, then they generate a gross of $0.1 x 2.5 million=USD250 000,00 on average a day on SMS only…Now let’s go on and say of the 2.5Miilion customers each of them buys a USD2,00 a day to make a voice call, that gives them USD5Million a day gross…hold on a minute, of the 2.5Million customers let’s assume 200 000 of them has a data plan to browse the internet and they spend USD15,00 a week which gives Telecel USD37.5Million every week on internet…NOw that is good cash. Please do the same for the more expensive Econet and you will see that indeed Networks are BIG Money spinners everywhere you go…No wonder why in the world ‘s to[p 10% richest guys, about 6% of these are telecommunications and IT gurus!! I am just assuming some of the above but they hold some water these assumptions…kikikikikikikiki