Telecel’s 15% data bundle discount promotion: the stats say this won’t work

Zimbabwe’s smallest mobile network operator (MNO) Telecel has announced that customers will now be getting a 15% discount if they buy bundles through its mobile money arm Telecash.

Enjoy a 15% discount everytime you get data bundles using Telecash! Hurry up and juice-up today. T&C's apply.#megabundlespromo#staysafe#tellsomeone pic.twitter.com/SHoYAPrWlw

— Telecel Zimbabwe (@Telecel_Zim) October 21, 2021

“Enjoy a 15% discount everytime you get data bundles using Telecash! Hurry up and juice-up today. T&C’s apply.”

This is straight-up copy and paste what NetOne has been doing for some time with its 20% that became 10% airtime discount bought from OneMoney but for data bundles. Now this isn’t a knock on Telecel, at this point, it has to try something because from the end of December 2020 to March 2021 Telecel lost 20% of its subscribers approximately 142,990. For over a hundred thousand people to decide to jump ship in the space of about three months suggests there are some serious problems.

Problems that I don’t think will be solved by giving out discounts through a mobile money service that lost 72.8% of its users in Q4, 2020 when POTRAZ last reported mobile money figures.

To make matters worse Telecel has the lowest market share for all mobile internet infrastructure:

• 2G base stations – 13.4%
• 3G base stations – 14.8%
• LTE base stations – 1.5%

The cynic in me is screaming “who is this promotion supposed to win over exactly?!“. Again, I get that Telecel has to get some traction from somewhere, but what good is a bundle discount if Telecel is at the bottom of the barrel in all respects.

The question now is “what can Telecel do?” and luckily my colleague Garikai Dzoma wrote a prescription of sorts which you can find in the link below:

Cell C is shutting down, perhaps Telecel should be taking notes

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