MTN South Africa has undergone a big restructuring. It’s folded its MTN Business subsidiary into its bigger mobile unit so that it is a now division rather than a separate legal entity. The move is meant to ensure that MTN’s corporate customers have one channel with which they interface for both mobile and fixed services.
“Enterprise customers have wanted to deal with one MTN,” says South Africa CEO Karel Pienaar. “Fixed-mobile convergence has happened and we’re finding more and more opportunity to provide ICT solutions as a mobile operator.”
MTN says its enterprise business unit is expected to contribute at least 20% of revenue to the group by 2017.
“From a legal perspective, we are now one organisation,” says MTN South Africa chief financial officer Zunaid Bulbulia, who is also acting in the new role of chief enterprise business officer following the departure of MTN Business MD Angela Gahagan-Thomson in July. The integration of the businesses took effect on 1 November.
“Over the years, we have had a patchy record in terms of launching products into the enterprise space and we’ve been seen as a bit of a follower,” Bulbulia says. “It’s not been at the same level of innovation as in the consumer side. On the enterprise side, we’ve not been as innovative and quick to market. Over the last four months, we have been trying to remedy that perspective.”
As part of the shake-up, MTN has introduced three new business-focused products, including an enterprise-focused “closed user group”, offering a shared voice bundle with “competitive voice call rates”, a “ProPack” tailored for small and medium enterprises and a push-to-talk product.
The company is also talking up its deal to supply bandwidth to Internet service provider Afrihost, which had previously purchased upstream capacity from Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions, saying this forms part of a bigger push into the wholesale digital subscriber line market. — (c) 2012 NewsCentral Media
