Business
Vodacom Tanzania added 4 million users in 2011
(Reuters) – Vodacom Tanzania, part of South Africa’s Vodacom Group, said on Friday it had boosted total users by a third last year and will spend about US$94 million over the next year and a half to expand network and data services.
Rene Meza, Vodacom Tanzania’s managing director, said the increase in users came from new customers joining its M-Pesa money transfer service, which has an 85 percent share of the total mobile commerce transactions in the country.
“We added over 4 million customers in one year. The biggest driver for such a growth was M-Pesa,” Meza told Reuters in an interview. He said the firm now had more than 12 million users.
M-Pesa, through which users can buy airtime and make payments, has been popularised in neighbouring Kenya by its biggest mobile operator, Safaricom.
He said Vodacom Tanzania had invested over 1 trillion Tanzanian shillings (US$ 627 million) over the past decade to make it the biggest mobile operator in the country.
Meza, who joined the company in September from rival Bharti Airtel’s Kenyan unit, said the company’s next main focus was to expand its mobile internet service.
“We have very ambitious plans for expansion, the next probably 12 to 18 months will see us spending over 150 billion shillings expanding our coverage,” Meza said.
“The mobile internet penetration in Tanzania is no more than 3 or 4 percent as compared to the 15 percent in neighbouring country Kenya, so there is tremendous opportunity for growth.”
