Etisalat laments poor returns on investment into networking..

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Etisalat Nigeria has said that its $300m investment in network expansion and upgrade this year has not yielded any profit.

The company said it had always run at a loss despite continuous investments in expanding its network to offer top-rank services to its growing subscribers.

Its Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Matthew Willsher, made this disclosure during an interaction with journalists.

“We have been ploughing back into the business all the revenues we make, but we are not yet close to breaking even,” Willsher said.

He, however, said the telco was optimistic that, with the growth it was seeing and its rating by the regulator, its investments would soon be profitable.

The Etisalat Nigeria CEO noted that the firm was also rolling out its mobile broadband network to provide quality data experience to its subscribers.

He said, “We want to be the best quality network. We want to have superior mobile broadband experience. As such, we will continue to invest heavily in the network to ensure that we cope with the number of subscribers we have on our network.”

Willsher added that Etisalat was the only operator with about 99 per cent uptime in service delivery.

The company’s Director, Engineering, Etisalat, Mr. Temi Ogunbambi, said, though the company had sold over 2000 of its passive towers to an infrastructure-sharing company, IHS, it currently has 7,000 base stations and 4,000 sites across the country.

Ogunbmabi said, “By the end of this year, we should have up to 5,000 sites. We have sold our passive sites to HIS.”

He said Etisalat had increased its telecoms subscriptions from 15.3 million to over 19.5 million, with 15 per cent market share in the country.

He also said it had upgraded 2, 100 exiting base stations with 2G and 3G capabilities to cater to the data need of its customers who were not in tune with using smartphones with quality Internet experience.

“In a number of states, we have built extensive metro fibre network to give our customers superior services. We have also had to build national and international fibre links. So, the investment we are making will make us achieve our goal of best quality service, improved network and rich contents, reduction in drop calls, slow data access and so on,” he said.