The Chief Executive Officer of MTN Ghana, Mr Serame Taukobong, has expressed the readiness of the players in the telecom sector to engage more with the industry regulator to device policies and regulations that will drive the industry forward.
“We need those regular engagements so that we can place our challenges on the table while we find an amicable way forward”, he said, adding that “the industry does not deserve antagonistic measures that will threaten its survival.”
Mr Taukobong made the call at an event dubbed ‘The Editor’s Forum’ under the auspices of MTN Ghana. It was a platform for the management of the company to interact with the media about the developments within the industry and the new products and services that the company has introduced onto the market.
“Engagements with us will enable us to tell what challenges we are facing. We are not against new policies and regulations but we believe that as players in the industry, we need to be engaged before new things are introduced”, he said.
Mr Taukobong refused to comment on two policies that the National Communications Authority (NCA) intends to introduce this year because the issues are before the courts.
The first is related to the Interconnect Clearing House which is expected to provide a common, independent mechanism, to resolve disputes and the settlement of interconnect accounting traffic for all the existing and future operators in the country.
The second is about the new tariff regime for On-net tariffs. The NCA is proposing to compel telcos to charge a minimum of 4Ghp per minute On-net in what the regulator believes was necessary to protect the smaller players.
Industry challenges
Mr Serame Taukobong, said the industry players were going through tough times because of the many challenging economic conditions.
He mentioned, for instance, the depreciating cedi which is fast eating into the profits of the company.
Presently, the cedi is trading at Gh¢3.6 to US$1 at the interbank level.
For instance, according to the Monetary Policy Committee report for February this year, in January 2015, the cedi depreciated by 1.3 per cent compared with 7.8 per cent depreciation a year ago, a phenomenon experts fear could worsen to negatively impact the operations of the private sector in particular.
He also mentioned the unstable electricity supplies across the country, otherwise called ‘dumsor’ which compels the company to run its equipment on generators and inverters at a high cost.
“If we do not ensure continuous running of these equipment, it will impact our service delivery and we do not want our customers to experienceany bad service”, he said.
On SIMBoxing, he said “we were losing as much as US$800,00 a month but we had to invest heavily to acquire some new equipment that detects these fast and that has paid off because we now lose US$100,000”.
He recommended the removal of the fixed price which to him will result in: increase in international traffic to Ghana, higher taxes for the government; and less profit for the SIMBOX, leading to reduction/elimination of bypass.
Mr Taukobong said the industry was also faced with the problem of frequent fibre cuts which disrupted their operations.
However, he noted that between January and December 2014, MTN passed all quality of service (QoS) monitoring tests conducted by NCA in all 10 regions of Ghana and, therefore, “No QoS fines from NCA”.
Priorities this year
This year, he said the company would improve its strategic partnerships, support data growth while expanding the customer satisfaction index.
He said the company would also ensure value driven and segmented offerings while streamlining the distribution network, adding that “we will make the financial services and mobile money a priority”.
Mr Taukobong said MTN would roll out a lot more SME projects while ensuring leadership to drive innovation to capitalise on identified opportunities.