When it comes to data, MTN has a problem. While it is selling more of it, it is also under pressure to slash the cost of providing access to the Internet. A solution may lay in financial services.
“We don’t have another chance to do this again. We have to do this right,” interim CEO Douglas Craigie Stevenson said in an interview with TechCentral.
Telkom customers are no longer able to force their phones to roam away from their home network after the telecommunications operator switched roaming partners from MTN to Vodacom at the end of June.
While its rivals Vodacom, MTN and Cell C struggle with flat growth in a tough economic environment, Telkom is killing it in the mobile business, showing astonishing growth in subscribers in the past year.
MTN South Africa has buckled under consumer pressure and will no longer implement its plan to introduce a “universal” 1MB out-of-bundle rate, from consumers would have to opt out.
Vodacom and Telkom will complete the work they need to do for their roaming agreement by the June deadline, Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub said this week.
Between 6 March, the day before MTN announced its results for the year to December, and 9 May, when it published a first-quarter trading update, its share price has increased by 36%.
MTN Group had 236.6 million subscribers on its books at the end of its financial first quarter, to 31 March 2019, up from 232.6 million at the end of December.
MTN South Africa on Tuesday warned of a new scam promising users an easy-to-remember phone number in exchange for payment, which is then stolen.
MTN has accused the Competition Commission of using outdated information in preparing its report on the data services market in South Africa.