300 million Sims a year for 60 million South Africans - Ferdi Moolman — MTN South Africa CEO Ferdi Moolman

MTN has been putting 90 million prepaid Sim cards into the South African market every year, and estimates the industry as a whole is pushing between 200 million and 300 million a year into a country of about 65 million people, adults and children.

The astonishing figures came from Ferdi Moolman, CEO of MTN South Africa, at a post-interim results media conference on Tuesday. “It just doesn’t make sense. This is huge. This is massive.”

The volumes drive revenue, he said, but not revenue MTN regards as sustainable.

MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita had set out the behaviour driving those volumes earlier in the same media presentation. South Africa has become a multi-Sim market, he said, with customers holding three Sim cards at once and moving between networks recharge by recharge.

“They get an offer from provider A, and then the next recharge they go to B, and then they go to C, and then they come back to A,” Mupita said. “Nine years ago, we would say Nigeria is a multi-Sim market, South Africa is a single-Sim market. It’s flipped the other way.”

The operators are not passive participants in this. Mupita described the “customer value management” engines running on each network — best-offer systems that register when a subscriber has not recharged for a couple of weeks and fire off another offer to pull them back.

Churn machine

The churn the industry complains about is in part manufactured by the industry’s own retention tooling, aimed at a mid-to-lower-end consumer Mupita said is shopping for the lowest price available. He put it plainly: “Our customers are smart.”

Moolman’s point is that Rica, the Sim card registration law, cannot cope with a base churning at that rate — the quality of the registrations does not hold up. He also drew a direct line from that to the account hijacking syndicates operating in South Africa.

Read: Telcos agree plan to tighten Sim registration under Rica

“A lot of you would have been aware of all these schemes that are being run in the market at the moment – people’s Facebook accounts, sometimes the Twitter accounts, WhatsApp accounts are hijacked, and you see the syndicate moves in that space,” he said. “If we can get the KYC to the level that it should be, you will see that fraud also drop substantially.”

The industry has responded with a new registration framework agreed through the Association of Comms & Technology, the operators’ industry body, and developed in consultation with the department of justice, which has responsibility for Rica. Implementation timing is still being negotiated between the operators.

MTN has not waited. It has capped registrations at 10 Sims per registration and now requires re-registration if a Sim stays dormant for 30 days after it is registered. That second control targets pre-registered Sims sold on the street – a Sim registered in someone else’s name, activated by whoever buys it.