MTN Ghana earmarks US$160m to deploy infrastructure

MTN Ghana is investing over US$160 million into its operational expansion and improvement project in 2019, as against US$144 million last year, its Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Selorm Adadevoh has said.

The company, as part of its broad-based expansion drive is deploying 350 new greenfield and 100 rural sites across all regions, whiles 3G network is being rolled out to 277 new site. The fiber rollout will involve 368km fibre-to-site whiles fibre broadband coverage expansion will also cover 45,000 new homes.

Speaking at an Editors Forum in Accra, Mr. Adadevoh, said: “MTN has deployed a total of 1,092 4G LTE sites at the end of March 2019, out of which 600 sites are 4G+ sites in different parts of the country especially regional capitals and key towns and plans for full national coverage is currently ongoing.”

The 2019 expansion which will cover technology development and infrastructure will include rolling out new Long Term Evolution (LTE) sites at over 300 locations and upgrading it to over 2600MHz in 600 collocations as well as existing sites capacity upgrades of  814 of the 2G platform and 560 of the 3G network.

On the growth prospects, he said the company posted a landmark growth for the year 2018 on strong performance on three key service areas which were Mobile money, data, and voice revenues, added that during the year under review, MTN Ghana recorded +60.3% and +30.2% of mobile money and data revenues respectively. While voice revenue surged to 15.1%.

All these contributed significantly to the growth and increased its contribution to total revenue of the company to 17.7%.

The reported earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) margin declined year-on-year by 2.2 percentage points to 37.6%, following the introduction of the management fee agreement which took effect on 1 May 2018.

The growth in mobile money, data, and voice revenues were influenced by the huge investments the telecoms giant made into these sections of its operations.

He assured customers of more exciting products and services this year as it plans to invest hugely in technology infrastructure.

“The company cherish the patronage of its customers and that is imperative to give them quality service for their loyalty. MTN will continue to put in extra efforts to come out with innovative products and services that will meet customer needs.”

He used occasion to unveil MTN TurboNet, an instant high speed internet product. “As part of our 4G campaign, we have launched a turbonet as a pilot which allows you to have a wireless box for internet at home. In the past we had to dig fibre in the ground all the way to people’s doorstep but today you can pick up a box in our office and you can plug it at home to have access to internet with fibre”, he stated.

He said though the product had not been commercially launched, over 7,000 boxes had already been sold.

Apart from quality network experience, he said, MTN Foundation was also making significant impact on the lives of Ghanaians through the execution of various projects in the areas of health, education and economic empowerment.