A recent sector performance report published by Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) shows that Telecel was the only mobile operator to record a decline in active mobile phone subscriptions in the first quarter of 2020.
The decline in Telecel's active subscriptions is due to limited base station availability and power supply challenges, hence subscriber attrition to competitor networks.
The firm's subscriber base dropped by 9.4% from 910 677 to 825 478 since the end of 2019. The report also points out that Telecel data traffic went down from 6.1 to 4.5 %
While the total number of active mobile money subscriptions grew by 4.6% to reach 7,673,201 from 7,334,639 recorded in the fourth quarter of 2019, Telecash was the only operator to record a decline in active mobile money subscriptions which reduced by minus 1.4 %.
More worryingly is the fact that other service providers like Ecocash recorded a 3.7 % growth with OneMoney recording an increase of 18.4 %.
