Love it or hate it, there are three things assured if you live in Zimbabwe and that’s death, taxes and an Econet sim card… If you want to contest this fact then just look at the recently released Q3, 2022 Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory of Zimbabwe’s (POTRAZ) Sector Report.
I’m impressed that Telecel and NetOne haven’t decided to rage-quit because the gap is monumental. Econet now commands 67% of the mobile subscribers (9,753,620) in the country which, incidentally if we are to take the latest census data (15,178,979) and Econet’s numbers at a 1:1, Zim’s largest mobile network operator covers about 64.3% of the country’s population.
With numbers like these, Econet Wireless as a company might only be competing with power utility ZESA when it comes to the sheer number of customers it serves.
What is more impressive is that Econet managed to gain 1.8% of the subscriber market from NetOne which shed 1.7% and the hapless Telecel which lost 0.1% to register 4,339,133 and 469,489 subscribers respectively.
Econet also did this while accounting for the largest share of voice (75.2%) and mobile and internet traffic (76.6%) in Q3, 2022 which as it so happens made up the biggest proportion of the ZWL$79.5 billion earned by mobile operators in Q3, 2022 according to POTRAZ.
This was also bolstered by the fact that operating costs were at ZWL$24.6 billion, which is just over a third of what the industry made as a whole and, of course, Econet probably reaped the largest chunk of the profits.
Also Read
Telecel: 81.8% subscriber loss since 2013, a decade of decline in numbers – The sideshow that is the downward spiral of Telecel has been something to behold. You would have been called a fool had you predicted in the noughties that Telecel would have less than half a million active subscribers in a decade-plus time.
