Nigeria’s fourth carrier, 9mobile, will require to invest $billion (about N4. 8trillion) to upgrade is entire network infrastructure to redefine its customers’ end user experience, its Chief Executive Officer, Obafemi Banigbe, has said.
Speaking via a Zoom call, he also said the push for telecom end user tariff hike will soon be resolved by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) so that operators could plan their business strategies in the new year.
He said 9mobile, a product of Etisalat, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) telecom group, had suffered from lack of investment over the last one decade or thereabout, a development that had led to service degradation and loss of subscribers.
Banigbe said a group of investors has stepped in to fund the resuscitation of the telco to reclaim its lost subscribers and play significant roles in the transformation of the country’s digital economy space.
He said the company, under the new management, has mapped out four phases in its recovery march.
He identified these stages to include stabilization, modernization, transformation, and growth.
According to Banigbe, the current investors in the telco are passionate and committed because they believe in the untapped potential of Nigeria’s digital space. He said the opportunities that come with the country’s huge youthful population is enormous, saying “we are still scratching the surface” .
He said customers left the network because of service degradation, a challenge which he promised will be addressed with a combination of infrastructure rollout and collaboration through infrastructure sharing.
He said the idea of operators digging to install fibre cables wasn’t economical, saying about 70 per cent of the cost goes into ‘trenching’ saying if all the operators come together and do it, the 70 per cent cost would have been saved and freed for other infrastructure.
Banigbe said the company will work towards recaptruring its niche market segments comprising the youths, small and medium enterprises (SMEs). “We are ready for the challenges. We don’t have three years to play catch up. We will share infrastructure and build new ones where necessary, ” Banigbe assured.
On the sustainability of the industry against the backdrop of current tariff regime, he said sustainability is doing business in a manner that is profitable and assures of return on investment (RoI), adding that given the current state of the economy, the industry was too far away from sustainability.
According to him, macroeconomic headwinds occasioned by persistent naira devaluation and inflation had done a deadly blow to the business, saying why other people that supply services to telcos have increased their charges, telcos were prevented from charging a cost-reflective tariff.
He said the TowerCos have increased their service cost by about 300 per cent while the banks too continued to hike the cost of funds.
He said contrary to insinuations that the NCC was foot dragging on the issue of tariff hike, the regulator was weighing the options and striking the delicate balance between not overburdening subscribers and ensuring the sustainability of the industry. “How to balance affordability with sustainability is the major concern of the government,” he said, adding that he was “hopeful it’s (tariff hike) going to happen soon. That would make the industry plan for the year.”
He lauded President Bola Tinubu for the Executive Order that classified telecom infrsstrure a critical national infrastructure, a development he said will help the industry stem the tide of willful infrastructure vandalism and theft.
He also commended the 9000km fibre project of the Federal Government which he said would reduce cost because if it’s on the open access model, operators will just plug and play.
