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Conrad Mwanawashe Harare Bureau
The restructuring and network expansion programmes currently ongoing at State owned mobile services provider, NetOne are expected to drive the company to profitability and enhance capacity to compete with its peers.

The network rollout programme which has seen 2000 base stations constructed in the first phase will see a further 2000 at about 600 sites next year.

“With that topology of network we believe that we’ll be reaching out to everybody giving them our products. We’re also coming up with value products that are well priced in the areas of data.

“The type of technology that we’re bringing, 4G and 4G LTE will enable faster speeds for those people that need data. This third phase will put us at par with our competitors,” acting chief executive Brian Mutandiro said on Friday.

Mutandiro was addressing the Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Parliamentary Portfolio Committee members who were on tour of the network service provider.

LTE -Long-Term Evolution-, (commonly marketed as 4G LTE) is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals.

“It’s a requirement that the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe wants to see us in the next five years covering 100 percent of the country. And so one of the issues that we will look at is making sure that we rapidly deploy network 3G, 4G and LTE and then we will come behind with all the other value added products that we can put on that platform.’’

Failure to follow up on infrastructure deployed around the country with value added products in the past was one of the reasons why NetOne failed to make money and caused the parastatal to lag behind its leading competitors. It is down to making business sense out of the infrastructure presence, according to Mutandiro.

“NetOne was focusing on putting the base stations. Business focus was not on the distribution of airtime. For example, you can have a base station that’s launched today but there’s no airtime in the vicinity. So then you’ve a lopsided situation where you spend money on infrastructure but you’re not providing airtime. So we’re addressing all those gaps. For us these are opportunities, low hanging fruits that we can quickly convert to revenue. That’s why I’m confident that by the end of this year we’ll have a positive bottom and we’ll declare a dividend to government,” said Mutandiro.

Other projects expected to improve visibility include an aggressive strategy to position the network. To this end, NetOne teams will be in the communities with various product demonstrations and operational marketing.

The changes implemented have already started paying dividends with the company now collecting more money per minute than in the past with collections surging to eight cents per minute compared to 2,8 cents per minute realised at the beginning of this year.