Asha Speckman
ORANGE Horizons, a subsidiary of French telecommunications firm Orange, has partnered with Nashua Mobile to extend its retail footprint, products and services to South Africa, and to its clients coming into the country.
The products were launched yesterday and will be sold in four Nashua Mobile retail outlets: Sandton City in Joburg, Brooklyn Mall in Pretoria, and in Cape Town at the Icon Centre and Canal Walk.
In January Orange launched an e-commerce store and an online portal geared towards the South African market, offering specialist electronic and telecoms-related products. In its deal with Nashua Mobile, a division of JSE-listed Reunert, Orange is focused on servicing customers on its database and Nashua Mobile clientele travelling between France, South Africa and Botswana.
The Orange booths in Nashua stores will offer prepaid SIM cards and top-up vouchers, bundled voice, data and SMS products, as well as unlimited access to 30 000 wi-fi hotspots in France, and to Orange Maps, a GPS navigation system.
Orange France customers are able to replace SIM cards at Nashua stores in the case of lost or stolen phones. South Africans can also subscribe to services offered by Orange France or Orange Botswana at local rates before leaving on a trip to those countries.
Tim Walter, Nashua Mobile’s head of strategy and transformation, said each store was chosen because of its proximity to tourists, travelling business people and foreign embassies in the main centres. He said the service could be extended to Mauritius next.
Sébastien Crozier, the chief executive of Orange Horizons, said South Africa was an important country in the group’s expansion strategy.
Crozier said the company was, however, not yet considering launching as a fully-fledged telecoms provider locally or as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which is a wireless communications provider that does not own the network infrastructure over which it offers services. UK telecoms company Virgin Mobile operates a virtual network in South Africa, relying on Cell C’s network infrastructure.
“We are not going to buy a mobile operator. It is not what we plan to do,” Crozier said, adding that Orange Horizons had met with the Independent Communications Authority of SA and other cellular network operators with a view to launch an MVNO. But it decided to hold off until it was convinced of the future success of an virtual operator in a market dominated by Vodacom and MTN.
Crozier said the lack of regulations for MVNOs or a wholesale price for incumbents to sell network services to virtual operators made it an unattractive project for now.