Nigeria’s fourth mobile network operator (MNO), 9mobile, said it has secured financial commitment from its shareholders to enable the telco to offer quality services to its end users and retake its lost market share.
Its Chief Executive Officer, Obafemi Banigbe, in a Zoom call at the weekend with select ICT editors in Lagos, said for the company to reclaim its lost glories, it has mapped out strategies which include national facility upgrade, revamp of customer touch-point across the country from its shop, through digital interfaces.
He said: “So what are we going to do in order to recapture that market share? The first thing is really service first. We have to reposition ourselves as a service organisation. And to do that, it means that we have to refresh our entire infrastructure, entire infrastructure from everything you can think of in making a telecom network work. We basically have to refresh that. Now in doing that, we know that it’s going to cost a lot of money. And what we have done is to secure investment from our investors, new investors, to be able to power these all investments we need to do in the market.
“And at the same time, we’re also looking at opportunities to take advantage of, let me use the word sharing, because we’re not going to be able to build every single fiber, every single base station by ourselves, given that we are far away in the market. We have the weakest coverage as far as the competition is concerned. And that we also are the very weakest from a point of view of 4G coverage. So effectively, it means that even from the point of view of fiber infrastructure, we have one of the lowest fiber infrastructures in the market. So we believe that in order for us to leapfrog and make sure that we reclaim our position in the market, it will require us to do multiple investments at the same time; so this is going to be the bedrock of our recovery.
“So once we have the network service out there, then we’re going to go back into our win back subscriber acquisition campaign. And that requires us to engage the customer in such a way as to reintroduce ourselves back in the market. We have to be able to refresh our brand. We have to be able to re-engage the trade to show that we are still credible, a credible partner to deal with. That will require a lot of market activation which we are preparing to actually get into the market to do. But we need to fix the basics first. And that basic is making sure that we have a network that works, a service that works, a service portfolio that is more appealing to the demography we are positioning ourselves to be able to attract,” he said.
On the niche segment of the market the telco will be targeting, he said: “We were very, very big in terms of the youth market at the time. We were very, very big from the point of view of an SME (small and medium enterprises) market. Those are market shares that we can still regain because as you know, the population of Nigeria is increasing. New businesses are starting every day. New people are getting to the market every day.
“Young people are still the majority from the point of view of demography as far as the Nigeria population is concerned. So there is still a chance for us to be able to recapture our lost ground. It will require a lot of work, but the underlying thing that has to happen is that we must bring back service quality in our network and the customer experience that we are used to. We must revamp our customer touch-point across the country from our shop, through our digital interfaces, to how the customer interacted with our product. All of this has to be put in place in order for us to be able to really compete in the market,” Banigbe said.
He recalled that since Etisalat exited the market, the performance of the business has been on the decline. “So at the time the new shareholders and the new management took over the business, the business was really grappling with multi-dimensional challenges and that we had to take on headlong. We have the issue of infrastructure. The overall infrastructure of the business has really not been upgraded. So we are dealing with a lot of obsolete infrastructure and then we are dealing with a whole lot of issues of declining revenue, declining subscriber base, costs that are skyrocketing in the business. So those were some of the, I mean a lot of the challenges that we are about to deal with,” he said.
On how the telco intends to address the numerous challenges on ground, Banigbe said the management is irrevocably committed to resuscitating the telco from its present state.
“In terms of taking these challenges headlong, we broke down our recovery plan into four phases. The phase number one is really the stabilization phase and this is where we are looking at how do you keep the business going? How do you stabilize the business from a quality point of view, from a network stability point of view, from a cost management point of view, from an employee morale point of view. So those are the things that we’ve been doing in the last six months and then we’re trying to revamp our whole internet process. We’re trying to look at quick things that we can do in order to ensure that we keep the business as a growing concern.
“The second phase of the agenda, which is also handled in parallel because we basically don’t have time in order to be able to sequence it as we would have loved to, is the modernization phase of the business. Now, in modernization, like I said earlier on, since Etisalat, the business has not really had any significant investment in infrastructure. Because of that, a lot of the infrastructure that is put there is really the ones we are still using. And then a lot of them, as you would understand, are quite old and then they need to be quite refreshed.
“So we’re currently in the process of refreshing our radio network, our core network, our transmission infrastructure, our billing system, our charging system, even our ERP systems. It’s like rebuilding the entire network from scratch. This is exactly what we are poised to do. And as we understand, that costs a lot of money in order to be able to put all these things back in place. Putting a service delivery platform that is more modern, that is more digital, that enables us to reposition ourselves as an innovative brand. All of these will cost money. The good news is that we have secured the commitment of our shareholders and the new investors in the business to secure the required amount of money that we need in order to be able to implement our overall modernization agenda for the business.
“So aside from modernization, we also need to deal with our overall transformation phase as we call it. Because it’s one thing for you to have infrastructure that is modernized, it’s another thing for you to have your building of the organization in terms of processes, in terms of reviewing of our product portfolio and trying to make sure that we at least can be back in the market as that innovative business that everybody knows it back in the days. Our brand has taken a major hit and we basically repositioned the brand. So, we’re going to be doing a lot of brand refresh activities, a lot of visibility out there in 2025 so that we can at least compete in the market like we used to.
“So, the fourth phase is the growth phase. Now, after you have stabilized, you have modernized and then you have transformed from the point of view of processes improvement, from a point of view of overall product proposition that we want to have there in the market, from the point of view of our brand, from the point of view of our channel engagement and from the point of view of our customer experience, from the point of view of our overall customer value proposition.
“We are definitely going to pursue growth objectives. And then for us, growing is really about the only way out of the current situation we find ourselves in. We need to recover our subscriber base, we need to recover our market position.
“And then we also need to grow our revenues, because we have not been able to participate fully in the growth that the industry has experienced in the last six, seven years, because of the fact that there has not been a major investment in the business. But like I said, we have very committed shareholders and we’ve been able to secure the required investment in order for us to implement all these things in order to make sure that the business can come back as a competing force in the market,” Banigbe said.
