MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita has said competition for subscribers is hotting up in South Africa’s prepaid mobile market, with consumers increasingly making use of multiple Sims.

Speaking at a media briefing on Monday, Mupita said South African mobile users are opting for devices with dual-Sim support and then shopping around for the best deals from the various networks so as to save money.

“We are seeing South Africa become a multi-Sim market,” Mupita said in the media call to discuss MTN’s third quarter trading update, which was published last week.

“When I joined MTN in 2017, South Africa was not a big multi-Sim market and customers were actually loyal to the brand. There has been in the last quarter or so quite a shift towards value-seeking [behaviour].”

According to Mupita, dynamism in the prepaid market, as apposed to the more stable and less competitive post-paid segment, means the potential for South Africa’s mobile operators to unlock growth in the next four quarters depends on how well they position their prepaid offerings.

He said value-seeking behaviour has for a long time been a defining characteristic of some of MTN Group’s African markets, including Nigeria. The shift in South Africa is driven by a combination of macroeconomic pressures that have placed strain on consumers, along with the increasing availability of dual-Sim devices.

eSim ‘too nascent’

Embedded Sim or eSim capability takes things to the next level, allowing subscribers to add, in some cases, up to 10 or more different Sims on a single device. When asked how the technology contributes to value-seeking in the South African market, Mupita said eSim technology is “too nascent” to play any significant role because the number of handsets supporting it make up a small portion of the market.

“Now the battle [among operators] is to show good value and a good network experience because there is a significant portion of that market becoming more sensitive to value,” said Mupita.

Read: South African networks need more spectrum for 5.5G

To compete on network experience in the midst of intense load shedding, MTN South Africa in its previous financial year deployed around R4.5-billion in capex towards network resilience. Mupita said investments in batteries and other backup power mechanisms helped bring uptime across MTN’s 13 000 base stations to 99% or more. With load shedding having ended, the investments originally diverted away from improving network capacity will now go back towards 4G and 5G infrastructure, he said.

Because it is cheaper to run and uses spectrum more efficiently than previous technology standards, MTN is making efforts to upgrade as much of its network to 5G as possible. But there are challenges hindering these initiatives, especially the cost of 5G handsets.

MTN aims to spend R9.7-billion in capex in its current financial year (to end-December 2024), of which R1.5-billion will go towards power resilience initiatives. Mupita sees this number continuing to decline, provided load shedding doesn’t return. “The power situation is much better, but we can never say it is fully behind us,” he said. — (c) 2024 NewsCentral Media

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