MTN South Africa CEO Ahmad Farroukh has echoed remarks made by Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub earlier this week that there’s a need for mobile operators to cooperate to reduce costs and improve efficiencies in a difficult market.
“As a newcomer to this industry, I am surprised by the lack of cooperation,” Farroukh said in an interview with TechCentral on Wednesday.
“Cooperation will have to be guided by our competition rules, but at the same time, we can do things that really bring value to our shareholders and to our subscribers,” he said.
Joosub told TechCentral on Monday that South Africa’s telecoms operators should work more closely together to reduce costs in an environment where input costs continue to rise but where prices for telecoms services continue to fall.
He said one of the big areas of opportunity for industry players to cooperate is in mitigating the impact of South Africa’s energy crisis such as by sharing diesel generators.
By pooling infrastructure and working more smartly together, the industry will be in a better position to weather the deflation occurring in both voice and data services, he added.
Farroukh said that to work effectively together to reduce costs, operators will need to leave their egos “on the side”.
“It’s becoming more evident that building infrastructure in South Africa is difficult,” he said. “We need to make the most of our fibre, our high sites… We need not spend the same rand two, three, even four times.”
On Joosub’s comments, Farroukh said: “My colleague’s remarks I receive quite openly. We will open the menu: how can we help you and how can you help us? We’ll open this [menu] for the entire market, so we can go and compete and get the best value for our subscribers.”
Already, MTN and Telkom have proposed a deal whereby they will more actively share each other’s infrastructure. The two companies are keen to sign a bilateral roaming agreement, allowing their users to roam seamlessly between their networks. Telkom also wants to outsource management of its radio access network — the bit of its mobile network that connects end users to its base stations — to MTN.
That deal is subject to Competition Commission approval. — (c) 2015 NewsCentral Media