Julians Amboko talked with Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa on a raft of issues, including the political and foreign exchange risks in Ethiopia as well as the valuation of the company.
Ethiopia awarded a consortium including Vodafone Group, Vodacom and Safaricom a licence to become the country’s first private mobile operator, though a bid led by MTN Group to become a second new entrant was rejected.
MTN Group CEO, Ralph Mupita has revealed that the telco would consider bidding for the second Ethiopian operating licence after initially losing to Safaricom.
“We took an approach that the opportunity, as strategic as it was, needed to meet our capital allocation framework and the hurdles that we saw given the licence conditions. We were particularly focused on the lack of mobile money in the licencing regime, and there were some issues around how the telco constructs would be accommodated within Ethiopia. We certainly priced for those things and near-term risks that we saw, and we felt that the financial bid there was appropriate.”
Image sourced from Techweez
Safaricom Kenya has launched a campaign where subscribers can get free data every day for 90 days depending on their data usage profiles.
According to
Gadgets Africa, this offer is “aimed at empowering more customers to take their offline passions online as part of the country’s digital transformation agenda”.
Peter Ndegwa, CEO of Safaricom, says “smartphones and the internet have become critical in our day to day lives, empowering us in different ways by connecting us to more opportunities. The 90-day free data campaign seeks to ensure that no customer is left behind by ensuring that all our customers can now access the internet, even at no cost”.
Ethiopia has is introducing competition to its telecoms services marketFull-service license awarded to consortium led by Vodafone and its associatesMTN was als…