Friday
August 7
2020

How Africa’s Biggest Telecom Companies Are Diversifying Their Revenue Streams

By Abubakar Idris

Over the last few years, Africa’s biggest telcos have been diversifying their revenue away from voice services. But the pandemic shows they still have more to do.

For African telecom companies, the last ten years have been both transformational and disruptive to their business models. Increased broadband penetration and growing internet adoption across key demographics are causing telecom subscribers to adopt over-the-top (OTT) services for communication needs.

SMS and traditional phone calls are being displaced and replaced by instant messaging and internet-enabled voice and video calls. In the last decade, WhatsApp and Facebook are responsible for the depletion of telcos’ SMS revenues.

Photo courtesy of Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.

Source: Techcabal (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Coronavirus, Technology
Tags
data, telecommunications