9mobile Charts New Roadmap to Address Multi-dimensional Challenges, Reclaim Lost Market Share

Emma Okonji

Having lost huge market share and a large number of subscribers to its competitors in the telecoms industry, following the exit of Abu Dhabi-based Etisalat Group from the Nigerian telecoms market in 2017, the new management of 9mobile, which metamorphosed from the old Etisalat, has announced a new roadmap that will enable it address its multi-dimensional challenges and reposition to regain its lost market share.

The move to reposition 9mobile is sequel to the fresh investment capital coming in from its new investors.

Chief Executive Officer of 9mobile, Obafemi Banigbe, who gave insight into the repositioning plan and the strategies to regain lost market share during a recent online media interaction, assured Nigerians that the repositioning plan would help 9mobile reclaim its lost market share and change the narrative about its declining subscriber number.

“Since Etisalat exited the market, the performance of the business has been on the decline. So at the time the new shareholders and the new management took over the business, the business was really grappling with multi-dimensional challenges that we had to take on headlong. We have the issue of infrastructure. The overall infrastructure of the business has really not been upgraded, and so we are dealing with a lot of obsolete infrastructure, and we are also dealing with declining revenue, declining subscriber number, and the high cost of doing telecoms business in Nigeria. So there were lots of challenges that we have had to deal with,” Banigbe said.

To address the multi-dimensional issues, Banigbe said the new management had to come up with four phased recovery plans, which include Stabilisation phase, Modernisation phase, Transformation phase and Growth phase.  
According to him, “The first phase is the stabilisation phase, and this is where we are looking at how we can stabilise the business from a network quality point of view, from a cost management point of view, and from an employee morale point of view. So the second phase of the agenda, is the modernisation phase of the business. Because we are still using the old infrastructure, there is need to modernise and refresh them. So we’re currently in the process of refreshing our radio network, our core network, our transmission infrastructure, our billing system, our charging system, and even our enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. It’s like rebuilding the entire network from the scratch, and this will cost us so much money. The third phase is the transformation phase, which has to do with the total transformation of our network by introducing new things that will reposition the brand as the most innovative telecoms brand. The fourth phase is the growth phase, where we need to grow our revenues, to enable us contribute to the growth of the telecoms industry and to Nigeria’s GDP,” Banigbe said.

Addressing the issue of telecoms industry sustainability and the call for tariff increase, Banigbe said the telecoms industry has contributed immensely to Nigeria’s GDP and the entire digital economy of Nigeria over the last 20 years.
He however said every business must be in a position to generate revenue that can cover its cost and be able to reinvest back into the business. “So if we do not generate enough revenues to cover our cost, we’ll have to resort to borrowing either from shareholders or from the capital market, and this will not lead to sustainable growth,” he said, adding that at the end of the day, it’s really about balancing affordability with sustainability, and making sure that the telecoms industry will be in a position to generate cash flow that is enough to cover its running cost.

Asked why telecoms operators must always run to the regulator to request for price increase, as in the case with the recent demand for tariff hike, Banigbe said the telecoms regulator doesn’t decide what operators charge per megabyte of data in terms of the overall proposition for data and voice. “The regulator’s role is to define the price floor, which is a kind of guide to pricing in the telecoms sector. The reason for fixing price floor is to avoid a situation whereby operators will engage in predatory pricing, thereby creating market monopoly. So, the price floor regime by the regulator, is to address the issue of bad players, the issue of operators engaging in predatory pricing and allowing operators to charge what is best within the approved price floor,” Banigbe said.