Movitel, a joint venture between Vietnam’s telecommunication Viettel Group and Mozambique’s SPI, has won the Mobile Innovations Awards for enterprises in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, the third time, in a row. This category presented to Movitel is not open for individual entries but considered by the Judges based on all the shortlisted entries in the awards. Movitel has outpaced many other strong telecom and electronic commerce companies to win the award thanks to its unique mobile operating solution in Mozambique initiating from the concept that telecom service is a kind of commodity that everyone needs. The solution is to popularize telecom services to every population, regardless of their locations or income conditions. This investment strategy has been successfully applied by Viettel in many telecommunications projects in different countries. Movitel has endorsed an initiative focused on offering full telecom services in rural and underserved areas in Mozambique, including mobile, fixed phone and Internet. The company has built up a great network infrastructure of 2,800 towers – accounting for 50 percent nationwide, 25,000km fiber optic cable – accounting for 70 percent nationwide. It has a widespread supplying chain to every village with 153 shops, 12,600 agents and points of sales and nearly 4,000 direct sales staffs. Movitel has applied a door-to-door model. With Movitel, local people can be served and cared at their house instead of walking far away to reach the shop or agent. The company has organized many social programs including free Internet broadband to schools, subsidizing handset cost for rural users, offering special packages designed to support low-income users such as farmers or students. By deploying a mobile network infrastructure in rural and remote areas; providing free Internet to 2,500 schools; and generating nearly 20,000 jobs in rural areas. After 2 years, Movitel’s initiative has helped increase the telecommunications coverage in Mozambique from 60 percent to 85 percent nationwide and from 35 percent to 70percent population. Mozambique is now among the top three nations in terms of fiber optical cabling infrastructure in Sub-Sahara Africa. Movitel’s initiative is leading in increasing their subscriber base thus raising their market share. Customers are benefitting from a strong and reliable network available countrywide, majority of who will be loyal to Movitel’s brand due to their strategy and effort to reach them. For these reasons, the switching rate from Movitel’s competitors to become its customers can be expected. This can be proved by the number of 5 million subscribers (making up 32 percent of market share) it has achieved since its inception in May 15, 2012 and it is poised to take the lead in the market in the coming time. Total revenue in 2013 is $154.5 million, bringing the company $8.8 million profit.
