Halotel Tanzania Managing Director Le Van Dai speaks during an interview with The Citizen newspaper last week in Dar es salaam.
Dar es Salaam. Halotel Tanzania is currently one of the
fastest growing telecommunication companies in the country and its management
believes the expansion is purely a result of its business strategy of focusing
on the poor communities.
Going by Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA)
figures, Halotel – which started its operations in the country two years ago –
has managed to register a total of 3.5 million voice subscribers during the
period.
Until March 31, 2017, the two-year old company commanded a
subscriber market share of nine per cent, outsmarting Zantel and Tanzania
Telecommunication Company Limited – which have existed for over a decade – and
Smart.
Halotel is now in the fourth position behind market leader,
Vodacom, Tigo and Airtel.
“Basically, our growth is anchored in our strategy of
focusing on poor rural communities. We also bank on the hard working spirit of
our people,” the managing director, Le Van Dai, told The Citizen in an
interview last week.
Halotel plans to invest $1.7 billion in Tanzania and latest
updates show that at least $700 million of the planned investment has already
been injected into the economy.
With the investment Halotel now covers 95 per cent of
Tanzania. “Our network is now available in at least 3000 villages that did not
receive any telecommunication signal before we came,” he said.
At a time when telecommunication companies are increasingly
focusing on mobile money and data, Halotel says it is taking the challenge and
would invest accordingly.
“Ours is a fast changing industry. If you operate for six
months without investing more cash, consider yourself gone.
Your competitors
will invest in issues that matter during that particular time and outwit you.
We pay attention to what is happening in the market,” he said.
Its mobile money (Halopesa) and data platforms are already
active. The focus, he said, is now much on how to bringing added services to
its Halopesa products.
“We have a comprehensive strategy with our Halopesa strategy
which goes in line with the government’s wider financial inclusion scheme,” he
said, adding that in partnership with other financial institutions, the focus
now is to see clients getting loans through Halopesa.
Network expansion
A few weeks ago, Halotel announced that it would inject $100
million (about Sh223 billion on the prevailing exchange rate) in network
expansion and service improvement in the move to grab an increased pie of both
data and voice communication market.
It said that the aim would be ensure that it increases the
number of its active Sim cards in the market to seven million by the end of
this year.
Source: The Citizen
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