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Oliver Kazunga Senior Business Reporter
ECONET Wireless Zimbabwe says its strategy to steer the business towards value added services has started bearing fruit as its overlay services showed strong growth in the half year to August 31, 2014. The company’s chief executive officer Douglas Mboweni said non-voice services products such as EcoCash, data services among others, were now contributing 21 percent to the telecommunications firm’s revenues increasing from below 10 percent this time last year.
“Cumulatively, the contribution of these products to Econet’s revenue has grown by 96 percent since the company began implementing the strategy.

“With Zimbabwe’s mobile penetration rate now above 100 percent voice revenues are beginning to mature.
“This trend isn’t unique to Zimbabwe as it’s common wherever markets reach such levels of maturity,” he said.

In response to this, Mboweni said Econet early this year announced a new thrust in strategy under which the business would focus more on growing overlay services to drive revenue growth and margin improvements into the future.

He said the latest financial results show that the strategy was working.
“We’d anticipated the trend away from traditional income streams.

“We then took a strategic decision to steer the business towards innovations that would become new sources of growth for our business. We’re beginning to see the fruits of that strategy,” he said.

He, however, added that voice services would remain a critical service offering and will continue to receive the appropriate attention.
“New investment is being committed to improve quality of service and customer care,” he said.

Reflecting the growth in non-traditional income streams the number of EcoCash subscribers has grown to 3.7 million from three million in August last year.
Econet’s number of agents has more than doubled rising from 7,000 last year to more than 15,000 at present.

The number of broadband subscribers shot up from 3.6 million in August last year to 4.7 million this year.