Leading Ethiopian telecom provider Ethio Telecom reported a number of encouraging results on July 10, 2024, including an 8.9% rise in subscribers from the same time previous year [2023], reaching 78.3 million.

In comparison to the results of the previous year [2022/2023], revenue for the fiscal year 2023/2024 climbed by 21.7% to reach Birr 93.7 billion ($1.64 billion). While earnings climbed by 20.9%, which is an increase of Birr 16.7 billion ($289.5 million) from 2023.

“EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation) hit a rate of 47%, reaching 102.4% of our target, according to our company’s unaudited report. We achieved 108.7% of our target with a net profit of 21.79 billion Birr, up 20.9% (3.76 billion Birr) from the same period last year, the telco stated.

With 47.5 million users throughout the fiscal year, TeleBirr, the telco’s flagship mobile money service in Ethiopia, is still expanding. Furthermore, according to Ethiopia, 2.55 trillion birr ($44 billion) have been transacted across the economy since the platform’s introduction on May 11, 2021, and 1.81 trillion birr ($31.3 million) were transacted through it in the budget year.

Despite competition from Safaricom Ethiopia, which joined the market in October 2022 and had over 3 million users of their mobile money service, MPESA, by February 2024, TeleBirr is still performing well. 33% of Ethiopia’s population is served by Safaricom’s telecommunications network.

But Ethio Telecom continues to lead because of its dedication to quality, highlighting ongoing initiatives to improve both its coverage and services.

“We concentrated on a number of important projects to accelerate our growth this past fiscal year. Among these were the development and augmentation of our digital and telecommunications infrastructure in order to satisfy the growing need for superior services. To provide effective and individualised help, we have also made ongoing network optimisation a priority and upgraded our customer care systems via a variety of channels.

966 sites have completed the 4G mobile network expansion, and 682 sites have completed the 3G network expansion. The overall number of 4G cities that are accessible has increased from 300 to 424 as a result of the extension of 4G network service to an additional 124 cities and districts thus far.

At the same time, the company increased 5G stations to 189 and consequently 5G service is now available in 4 regional capitals, with implementation work underway to make 4 more cities 5G-ready.