Johannesburg - MTN South Africa would inject R12 billion capital expenditure (capex) to improve the voice, data and fixed broadband experience for its customers in the 2016 financial year, chief executive Mteto Nyati said yesterday.
Nyati was speaking during a press conference on investment plans by the local unit of telecoms giant MTN Group. “While people are scaling down on capex, we have decided to do the opposite. We have decided to make this and believe that this… is a good opportunity for us,” he said.
MTN SA invested R10.5bn in capex last year, while its arch rival Vodacom increased its capex to R8.7bn in the year ended March from R8.6bn in the comparable period last year.
Nyati, who has been at the helm for nine months, said although the firm had managed to grow its revenue for the first time in two years in the year to March last year, there was room for improvement.
“We delivered 3 percent growth (in) the year to March after a two-year decline. Is that something we are excited about? Not at all. We want to ensure that each quarter we deliver growth,” he said.
MTN is facing stiff competition and its parent company MTN Group has slipped to become Africa’s second-biggest cellular company by market value after Vodacom.
Larry Annetts, MTN SA’s chief consumer officer, said between January and March, MTN volumes of devices sold to South African customers surpassed the market by 61.3 percent, and attributed this to its digital strategy to focus on affordable and own-branded smart devices to bridge the digital divide.
Annetts said this had enabled customers to buy 7.6 million smartphones, which reflected a 10.6 percent increase in the number of devices last year, leading to a 37 percent rise in data revenue pushed up by attractive voice and data offerings.
“The unpacking of our digital strategy and investment in improving our infrastructure, as well as a focus on delivering a seamless and distinct customer experience – coupled with new innovative products and smart devices – has allowed MTN to continue achieving milestones in providing affordable mobile broadband services and life-changing products,” he said.
Krishna Chetty, the acting chief technology officer, said the company was planning to halve dropped calls, as these as well as sluggish data speeds, had frustrated users.
“The biggest pain point for me is repetitive dropped calls. We have introduced a geo-technology to deal with this,” Chetty said.
MTN also pledged to increase peak user speeds by up to 28 percent for 3G, and 108 percent on the LTE network.
Chetty said R2bn would be invested in unlimited bandwidth until 2019 through the roll-out of a long-distance fibre infrastructure. Shares fell 1.91 percent to close at R125 yesterday.
BUSINESS REPORT