Africom slashes device prices by as much as 71% for Zimbabwe Golf Open

L.S.M Kabweza Avatar

africom-devicesThe annual Zimbabwe Golf Open is always a great time (and place) to buy Africom gadgets. See, Africom always has a booth at the tournament and they basically sell devices at giveaway. I’d actually coincide any Africom device purchases with the event if it were practical to wait a whole year. The good news is Zim Open is taking place as you read this; from today until the 21st.

Devices that have had their prices slashed, from what we can tell in the adverts, include the CDMA mobile Wi-Fi device, which is called the AC30 Mobile Hotspot (something similar in functionality to the Econet device we covered a few days ago) and a ZTE CDMA feature phone.

You can either get just the MiFi for US $75 or you can buy it together with the two mobile phones for $100. The usual price for the MiFi is $180 and the phone goes for $88 apiece. So yes, difference is as much as 71% for the phone.

Tournaments aside, we were still curious to know why they’re discounting to levels that, if they were not overcharging before, are clearly far below cost.  A source at the company tells us they’d rather give these things away then have customers consuming voice and data services, than incur the costs (and missed revenues) of keeping the devices.

Which brings us to tariffs; voice calls are 6 cents when calling a number of the same network and 12 cents for calls to other networks. Data on the other hand is 2.5 cents per megabyte. Full tariff table here.

4 comments

  1. Chris Mberi

    Makes sense to give out gadgets because that’s not their core business. Better still they should have given them to smaller dealers. I know of a company I used to work for that held on to equipment till the technology became obsolete…

  2. Future

    who wants a phone without whatsapp? those phones suck and are behind the technology curve!

  3. mdu

    whats the exact model of the cdma handsets and are these prices valid at all their shops?

  4. Sweet MiFi | Techzim

    […] device that can be used on a CDMA network. Powertel has these selling for $80 and Africom used to sell these for $75- I don’t know if the price has changed. If you are frugal like me, then you […]

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