A Closer Look at Telecel’s Diminishing Market Presence, Despite Subscriber Growth

We only ever get to see what Telecel and NetOne are up to when the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) releases sector reports.

Zimbabwe’s telecommunications sector saw significant activity in the fourth quarter of 2024, according to the latest report.

The report provides an overall picture of the market. However, let’s focus on the performance of Telecel.

Subscribers

Q4 2024 saw general growth in the mobile sector, with active mobile subscriptions across all operators increasing by 3.71% nationally.

Believe it or not, Telecel also grew, recording an increase of 0.88% in its active mobile subscriptions—growing from 377,790 in the third quarter of 2024 to 381,097 in the fourth quarter.

Don’t get me wrong—for what used to be comfortably the second-biggest MNO, this is paltry. We would have to reduce Econet’s figure by 11 million for them to be in Telecel’s league.

Anyway, despite gaining subscribers in raw numbers, Telecel still saw its mobile subscriber market share shrink. That’s because the competition grew at a faster rate.

Telecel lost subscriber market share by 0.07%. In terms of market share, Telecel held 2.50% in Q3 2024 and 2.43% in Q4 2024. That’s about a rounding figure at this point, if we’re being honest.

Voice

Looking at mobile voice traffic, the sector as a whole saw massive 41.78% growth.

However, similar to subscriptions, Telecel saw a decline in its voice market share, losing 0.02% in the quarter.

Telecel’s voice market share dropped from 0.07% in Q3 2024 to 0.04% in Q4. This now literally rounds down to zero, and it will be an uphill task turning this around.

While essentially losing the voice battle is terrible, if you’re a glass-half-full kind of guy, you could argue that the trends show that the future belongs to internet/data traffic.

You’d be partially right, because there will always be voice calls, and so losing that revenue is no cause for celebration. However, you’d be right that winning the mobile internet race would be a suitable consolation.

The growth in national voice traffic was heavily influenced by a significant increase in net-on-net traffic, potentially boosted by festive promotions.

However, international traffic saw a downward trend because of the increasing use of third-party applications like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offering cheaper voice and video calls.

Those alternatives require internet services, and so losing voice to gain data traffic is not that bad.

Data traffic

Mobile internet/data traffic also saw a huge increase nationally, growing by 24.0% in petabytes.

Telecel’s mobile internet/data traffic saw a tiny growth of 0.42%, increasing to about 263TB in Q4 2024.

That is a comically low figure because that translates to about 87TB per month.

We have heard some Econet SmartBiz customers complain that the fair usage policy caps their usage to 1TB per month. Just 87 of such people would match Telecel’s whole monthly usage.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Despite its own traffic growth, Telecel’s share of the total mobile internet/data traffic market declined by 0.07 percentage points in the fourth quarter.

Telecel’s market share went from an abysmal 0.35% in Q3 to a critical 0.28% in Q4.

So, if the future is data traffic, then Telecel is missing out on that too.

Revenues

The report does not tell us how much of the sector revenues were contributed by Telecel. However, it can’t be much for an operator with:

• Voice – 0.04% market share
• Data – 0.28% market share

Remember, the other revenue streams like SMS and other VAS increasingly contribute virtually nothing to total mobile operator revenues—hence why these reports don’t even bother talking about them anymore.

So, there is no other revenue stream Telecel is relying on, which makes you wonder how they are even surviving at this point.

I have seen a few Telecel ads doing the rounds in some WhatsApp groups these past months, and so they are still trying, I guess. However, the other worrying bit is that they are trying to lure in people with discounts.

This means that even with 0.04% voice market share, they are most likely earning less than 0.04% of voice revenues—the same being the case for data too.

Just a matter of time

Remember that while the report details mobile operator revenues, operating costs, and capital expenditure, this data is aggregated for all MNOs collectively.

Similarly, infrastructure deployment data—such as base station counts—is provided as a total across all operators. Therefore, the specific financial performance or infrastructure investment by Telecel cannot be isolated from the figures given.

However, you can count on Telecel losing ground there too.

So yeah, Q4 2024 saw Telecel grow its active mobile subscriptions and mobile internet/data traffic volume. However, the overall sector grew, and so Telecel’s market share in terms of subscriptions, voice traffic, and data traffic all decreased.

We are firmly in “new capital injections or bust” territory. I don’t know how many quarters like these Telecel can endure.