Ethiopian Review

By Kirubel Tadesse | Capital Ethiopia

Sales of a number of telecom services, including mobile services, have fallen short of targets by significant amounts, a Government report disclosed last week.
Mobile service sales showed a shocking underperformance by twenty per cent, mainly due to network congestion and late projects.
The Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) report, submitted to parliament early last week, explains that the first nine months of the current budget year saw overall telecom service sales falling from the target on average by nineteen per cent.
The number of mobile subscribers is mounting and the state telecom monopoly Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) says it now has 3, 119, 493 customers enjoying the service of its current capacity to support nearly 4.8 million customers.
According to the report of the MoTC, the disappointing sales are partly caused by the ongoing optimisation work on a number of vendors’ networks.
The second phase of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is also running late, contributing to the poor sales.
ETC has recently improved mobile and other service fees, including pre paid SIM card subscription fees, which were brought down to 169.10 birr from 368.10 birr, a 54 per cent decrease. The corporation didn’t say if the latest price improvements have anything to do with the sales’ shortfall.
The poorest performing service, rural connectivity, registered a 29 per cent shortfall from the target sales.
The state telecom monopoly currently connects 12, 329 kebeles, as well as 669 high schools, via School Net and another 565 areas through Wordanet. The service also links 45 agricultural and research centers via Agrinet that offers sound, image and as well as data two way exchanges.
Internet, another service ETC improved subscription and tariffs for, also showed a seventeen per cent sales underperformance. The corporation said it has just built a capacity to support up to 100, 000 customers. However, it is currently providing for less than half that number, and the quality of the services, like the internet and mobile network, is frequently criticised by customers.
Fixed line and public telephones sales revenues also fell short of targets. The former is attributed to the ongoing but late Next Generation Networks.
The public telephones revenues are said to have dipped because maintaining the broken Siemens phones was not feasible and they were pulled out of operation.
The reported sales revenues decline is yet to be clearly understood as ETC has not released its six month performance report.
Capital’s efforts to contact ETC were unsuccessful.