Ethiopia’s state-owned telecom operator, Ethio Telecom, revealed in its half-year report that it earned a half-year net profit close to the annual net income of the previous year.
Ethio Telecom acquired a total revenue of more than 697 million USD, from which the net profit amounts to over 152.54 million USD in the first half of the Ethiopian fiscal year 2022–2023. The telecom operator achieved a net profit of about 169 million USD in the previous year.
More than 104.4 million USD (19.9 percent) was generated in the last six months than the same period last year.
Firehiwot Tamiru, CEO of Ethio Telecom, said: “what makes this report special is that it’s the first business performance summary report since the new private telecom operator [Safaricom Ethiopia] joined the market share”.
Ethio Telecom announced in a statement that it is closing its previously implemented three years strategy with outstanding results of 75.6% growth in customer base, 76% growth in revenue, 104% growth in foreign exchange revenue, and 142% growth in net profit.
Ethio Telecom’s subscribers reached 70 million achieving 98.6% of the subscriber base target and an increase of 15.1% which is an addition of 9.2 Million customers from a similar period of the previous budget year. Its mobile voice subscribers reached 67.7 Million, data and internet users 31.3 million, fixed services 862.2 thousand and fixed broadband subscribers reached 566.2K, according to the report.
It is also disclosed that Telebirr, Ethio Telecom’s mobile money service, has reached more than 27.2 million customers and transacted a total of 166.1 billion ETB (about 3.1 billion USD) in the economy in six months, generating an income of 82.5 million ETB (about 1.5 million USD).
Among the mentioned challenges Ethio Telecom faced during the period is the service outages due to security instability, which compromised expansion and enhancement projects implementation, supply chain, increasing operational costs, and revenue impacts.
Moreover, fiber and copper cable vandalism, commercial power interruption, and delays in land acquisition for the deployment of new sites are noted as other drawbacks which jeopardized its operation during the time.
Firehiwot Tamiru disclosed that 413 mobile sites which were damaged and malfunctioned by the conflict in the country were restored back to service in the past six months. She also added that 174 network sites are maintained in the war-affected Tigray region.
