Ethio telecom unveils its newly developed Three-years LEAD Growth Strategy

Ethio Telecom unveiled its new three-year development strategy covering the period from June 2022 to June 2025. Named “Lead,” the new strategy is expected to enable the company to develop new business areas and solutions beyond connectivity, according to Frehiwot Tamiru, Ethio Telecom’s CEO.

Ethio Telecom with a new beginning and a new perspective, began implementing its newly devised three-years LEAD Growth Strategy starting from July 01, 2022, with a vision of providing services beyond connectivity, enabling inclusive growth by providing digital and financial services and simplifying the daily activities of organizations and individuals.

This strategy is a rolling strategy with deliberate and emergent strategy development approaches to accommodate a changing reality, considering the nature of the business and the ongoing market conditions.

To ensure competitiveness and sustainable growth of the company, this strategy has been developed by considering and reviewing relevant government policies, international best practices, and Industry trends.

Various important analyses have also been made such as internal and external stakeholders’ interests and expectations (Customers, Employees, Vendors/suppliers and various government organs), past company performances, internal strengths, organisational resources and capacities, and weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the outer environment and the market dynamics.

After these multi-faceted observations and analysis of environmental conditions, a total of 20 strategic issues were identified and six strategic thematic areas were formulated.

The strategy is designed to satisfy the ever-changing customer demand, digital inclusion to create better digital economy, financial inclusion, enhance productivity, shift the revenue from traditional revenue streams to value added and content driven services by introducing new business streams and solutions.

In the competitive market, we shall work towards satisfying our customers who are the basis to our company’s existence by providing various service options that will increase their loyalty, improving our services accessibility, facilitating digital channels, improving post-sales services to enable them to have better experience, and implement network expansion programs that increase the quality of service and network density.

To boost customer’s satisfaction and ensure customer loyalty, Ethio Telecom is working on creating easy customer journey by simplifying offers, availing multiple products and services, empowering customers, enhancing after sales services and enhancing loyalty programs. In addition, the company is working on improving the services accessibility, facilitating digital channels, engaging more partners, offering subsidised and installment based handsets and availing credit services etc.

The strategy will also continue to focus on the most important company asset – employees, to equip them with relevant knowledge and develop high performance culture, with skill that will enable them to grasp and catch up with the telecom industry dynamism, to exploit opportunities arising from development of the industry and cope with the challenges.

Telecom business needs collaboration and concerted efforts of all players in the ecosystem, to this end, the strategy will be discussed with partners including vendors and distributors, content providers and other stakeholders. This will further enhance strategy execution, shortening of TTM, meet customer demands by adopting new solutions and insights.

Potential challenges during the strategy period are: service outages related to security, lack of supply of foreign currency, market competition, market instability and inflation, global supply challenges, infrastructure damage, telecom fraud and cyber-attacks, regulatory issues, etc. Various solutions and programs are designed and being implemented with a separate work unit assigned to solve the threats and challenges identified by the strategy.

In the 2015 fiscal year, our company plans to make multifaceted efforts to provide quality services that increase customer satisfaction and improve experience, especially through network and system capacity enhancement and improvement projects to secure the company’s market share, as well as new technologies to provide services.

Data traffic growth based expansions of 3G and 4G/LTE Advanced services, network capacity and coverage enhancement activities, 5G pre-commercial expansion, backhaul and transport network capacity enhancement activities, Fixed broadband capacity enhancement, enterprise, solutions, mobile money and digital financial services, cloud services, Operations support system and Corporate Solutions projects as well as security solutions and technologies to provide new services and various civil construction projects are planned to be implemented.

In this fiscal year, Ethio Telecom plan to increase our subscriber base by 10.3% to reach 73.5 million and increase mobile voice customers by 10.5% to reach 71 million and increase the number of fixed broadband customers by 37.4% to reach 696.7 K and increase tele density by 68%.

Ethio Telecom aims to generate 75.05 billion birr, a 22.4% increment, by engaging in new business streams and shifting revenue source from traditional to value-added services, offering local and international products & services to the market, increasing telebirr’s access, service types and partners, improving service delivery and by increasing customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty.

It has been two months since Ethio Telecom started implementing its newly devised LEAD strategy, and in the first two months it already has achieved 98% of its target. To keep satisfying the customers and increase loyalty, Ethio Telecom have released different products and services.