By Erica Apeatua Addo
Takoradi (W/R), May 21, GNA-MTN Ghana is most likely to exceed the USD 1 billion target the company set out in 2021 to invest in infrastructure and information systems in the next five years.
Mr Selorm Adadevoh, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) MTN, Ghana announced this in Takoradi during the 2023 stakeholder and media forum for Western and Central Regions.
“Leveraging technology to serve customers with excellence” was the theme for this year’s forum.
He said by the end of 2023, MTN would have spent approximately USD 650 million in the areas they projected to work on.
“With 4G population coverage, we are at 99.3 per cent while, 2G and 3G, we have a population coverage of 99.5 per cent. This year, we hope to expand to 350 new sites, and 4G sites to about 1000. We also intend to invest massively in our infrastructure” he explained.
The CEO noted that on fibre connectivity they have about 9000 kilometres and would continue to expand this with additional investment as the firm sought to ensure that the backbone infrastructure was also in place for digitization.
“For instance, we should deliver on average five megabytes per second for any 4G transaction or at the minimum five megabytes per second on all 4G transactions. Today we are not there, and these are the things we want to improve upon so we can guarantee our cherished customers a minimum of a certain type of experience.”
“On 3G today, we are in most places but when we have peak hour, traffic it turns people down so, these are some of the things we are trying to enhance.”
Explaining more on the five pillars of the telecommunication firm, he stated that Ayoba and Fintech have 2.5 and 15 million customers respectively and that they were making quite quick progress and needed to do more.
Mr Adadevoh further said, “Network as a service, most of you might have heard that we had national roaming partnerships with Bolt, Vodafone and Airteltigo and again we are doing quite well but a lot more should be done to get to our ambition.”
“Not all the platforms will be at the same stage in 2025. Fintech, Ayoba and Network as a service will be ahead and then Enterprise and Chenosis will be behind”, he indicated
The CEO emphasized they had not changed their ambition for 2025 because it was their core strategy, hence everything they embarked on now goes towards that initiative.
GNA