MTN goes beyond barriers and borders

Lowry presented a short history of the company and outlined its vision to increase mobile penetration in Africa and the Middle East and close the digital divide. "It is our vision to bring Africa to light; to achieve this, we need to extend our services beyond restrictive barriers to entry, and to overcome the challenges which are creating borders to adoption. Only when we have achieved this, will we have achieved the vision that gave birth to MTN in 1994," said Lowry.

"The company's growth has been achieved through three focus areas - expansion into new markets, acquisitions such as Investcom and aggressive organic growth. The investment of R24.49 billion of Capex for this financial year is the outward expression of MTN's vision and intent, with Ghana, Nigeria, Iran and South Africa as the countries being targeted in this fiscal," states Lowry.

"Overcoming the barriers that hinder adoption will result in faster customer growth. Barriers that hinder customer growth include affordability, simplicity, clarity and flexibility. We are overcoming these four barriers with the introduction of various products that offer our customers firstly, affordability - one being our unique MTN Zone product which offers customers up to 95% off their call charges depending on area and network load. With our R5 a minute roaming offer across Africa, customers enjoy affordability, simplicity and clarity. And, our newly-introduced price plan for contract customers, MTN AnyTime, is an offer which combines to overcome all four barriers," explains Lowry.

The challenge of bridging the global digital divide and expanding the MTN services beyond borders is where the company's current focus lies. "We need to create a connected continent. But, in order to do this, we need to overcome challenges such as the cost of devices and how we take Africa to the world and bring the world to Africa."

Handset devices that offer voice, data and multimedia services need to be accessible to everyone. MTN is currently working to drive down prices of handsets that support these services to a recommended price of between US$30 and $40.

"Taking Africa to the world becomes a reality as we invest heavily in infrastructure across the MTN footprint. Our current investment in an extensive self-provisioning project to create a national fibre backbone, will see us bringing the world to Africa," said Lowry.