AfricaPress-Tanzania: VODACOM Tanzania Plc has registered strong commercial growth evidenced by increase lead of its market share to 32.8 per cent where its customer base rose by 1.4 million to 15.5 million customers.
Commenting on the preliminary financial results for the year ended ending March, Managing Director for Vodacom Tanzania, Hisham Hendi attributed strong growth to increase in service revenue growth of by 0.9 percent to solid commercial execution supported by strong customer growth.
The lower growth in the second half of the year was mainly a result of the barring of 2.9 million non-biometrically registered customers biometric registration process and the associated compliance costs expenditure as well as intense competitive pricing pressure.
“Our customers continued to benefit from Vodacom’s superior network quality on the back of our significant capital investment of 154.6bn/-in expanding our 4G coverage and improving the quality of our network and services,” he said.
In addition, he said following improved digital payment offerings, M-Pesa revenue has reported an increase of 7.4 per cent contributing 35.0 percent to service revenue, up 2.2pp, driven by increased transactions per customer.
“M-Pesa continues to deliver on its promise of delivering financial inclusion in Tanzania, empowering customers to transact easily and contributing to economic growth. We now have 10.1 million customers using the service, processing 1.4 billion transactions worth 58.1tri/-in the mobile money system during the year,” he said adding that the company will continue to expand the M-Pesa ecosystem with more services to meet real-time and continuously evolving customer needs.
The report shows data revenue growth of 9.8 percent contributing 17.7 percent to service revenue, up 1.5pp, supported by the strong demand for mobile data services, investment in the data network and increased smartphone penetration in the country.
“We made considerable progress in the past the year in prioritising financial inclusion through our mobile money platform, M-Pesa, while enabling a digital society through connectivity,” he said.
“This included introducing an affordable 25 US dollars smart-feature phone, offering more M-Pesa services such as our overdraft product as well as expanding our international remittance portfolio, supported by continuous investment in the network.
These efforts will further support the increasing demand for data and M-Pesa services by our customers, and expected to be the strong driver for growth in future. We have revamped our digital services with the aim of providing customers with more services through digital platforms and build a diverse revenue stream,” he added.
Commenting on the outlook for the year, Hisham said, following the Covid-19 outbreak that is affecting nations and citizens all around the world, Vodacom Tanzania’s priority is around health and safety of our employees while continuing to deliver services and support to our customers as well as assist the government where possible, to cope with the Covid-19 situation.
“We continue to closely monitor the latest guidance from the World Health Organisation as well as local health authorities and have well developed business continuity plans in place for dealing with such events.
We have a dedicated team working to maintain the level of service our customers expect from us and have made available various digital offerings to assist enterprise clients. We expect the Covid-19 pandemic to have an impact on our operational and financial performance, particularly in the first half of the year,” he said.
The management is monitoring the situation and proactively dealing with the related challenges. To date the company has not experienced significant supply disruptions however it is monitoring the situation closely and putting in place the necessary measures to mitigate disruptions.
