Photographer: Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis News/Getty Images Ethiopia Telecommunications Corp. failed to hit its first-half revenue target due to outages and disruptions caused by the war in the north of the Horn of Africa country.
State-owned Ethio Telecom raked in 28 billion birr ($561 million) in the six months through Jan. 7, Chief Executive Officer Frehiwot Tamiru told reporters in the capital, Addis Ababa. That was 7% more than a year earlier, but 14% below the target. Property worth almost 329 million birr was destroyed in the violence, Frehiwot said.
Fighting has engulfed Africa’s second-most populous nation since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in November 2020 ordered an incursion into Tigray in retaliation for an attack on a federal army base. The conflict has hammered investor confidence in what was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
“Out of our 8,000 mobile service sites, 3,473 of them were not operational for different periods of time,” Frehiwot said. Fiber-optic cables, generators, fuel tankers, batteries and towers were looted or stolen, while 10 of the 17 service centers outside the capital were fully or partially closed. Brace for Competition
Subscriber numbers jumped 20% to 60.8 million from December 2020, while mobile data internet users rose to 23.4 million.
Users of telebirr, a mobile money service introduced barely eight months ago, rose to 13.1 million, with transactions reaching 5.1 billion birr.
Ethio Telecom has expanded its 4G service to 136 towns before rival Safaricom Telecommunciations Ethiopia starts to roll out its network in the expansive Horn of Africa nation. The unit of Safaricom Plc of Kenya won a license to operate in the neighboring nation last year.
“We have been bracing ourselves for the competition including investing on expansion from our own coffers, not with debt,” Frehiwot said.
