Mobile company's subscribers top a million
UTL now joins its old competitors in the seven-digit subscribers' bracket with MTN Uganda leading with over 2.5 million subscribers while Celtel Uganda says it has attracted over 1.1 million subscribers having hit a million last year. This puts the number of mobile phone subscribers in Uganda at over 4.6 million.
On February 7, Warid Telecom, a new operator, also started its commercial services and said it had pre-registered up to 300,000 potential customers on its network. The number of individuals on these networks is however hard to compute because most of the customers possess either one or more than two GSM sim cards which they use depending on the affordability of the service provider.
Kaheru said, “The last quarter of 2007 saw the company grow by 26%. The major lift in growth can in part be attributed to Uganda telecom's ambitious and aggressive expansion plan”.
Within the quarter, UTL initiated its Extend your Festive Spirit promotion which is seen as another major contributor to the growth in December 2007 and January 2008. The promotion started on December 5, but the company lured many subscribers to its network with a promise of four Toyota Hilux pickups. Three have already been won and the last one will be drawn in Lira on 16 February 2008.
In June 2007, the company signed two major contracts worth $135m, enabling it to penetrate more areas nationwide. UTL also signed a €20 million contract between UTL and Alcatel-Lucent in Kampala in August last year. The contracts have facilitated the expansion of its GSM/EDGE mobile network and the deployment of the first UMTS/HSPA network in Uganda.
”We have just completed our network upgrade now boast a variety of communication solutions including GSM, 3G services, BlackBerry solutions, landline services, Internet and data, plus various business solutions and we attained this milestone in the last week of January 2008,” Kaheru said.
The company is also in the process of setting up new base transmission stations to increase its presence to over 75% of the country's population, greatly increasing the network coverage for the company.
