MTN loses US$4m to battery theft
Leading mobile telecommunication operator, MTN Ghana, says it lost over US$4 million to battery theft in 2014. The company said the power situation had compelled people to set up their own redundancies which had led to unscrupulous people stealing its batteries to sell to the public.
Redundancy in the telecom industry refers to the company having a back-up equipment to replace faulty ones over time.
The Corporate Services Executive of MTN, Ms Cynthia Lumor, said the situation, coupled with fibre cuts, had required the company to put in enough redundancies so that the traffic impacting fibre cuts would reduced.
“The sad part is that putting those redundancies means that we are diverting our capital expenditure investment to areas where we really shouldn’t because we have already invested in, and that’s money we could have invested elsewhere,” she said.
Speaking at a meeting with some members of the Journalists for Business Advocacy (JBA) in Accra, Ms Lumor said, the company’s cell sites could not operate without power so when electricity went off it had batteries that took up the supply of power and then had double redundancy in terms of generators.
However, she said when the power went down and the battery was supposed to take over automatically before the generators took over, a lot of the time the automatic back up did not happen.
She said in recent times some arrests had been made and that MTN had taken steps to increase security at most of its sites.
She said that MTN, in collaboration with the Association of Road Contractors, was working to resolve the issue of fibre cuts, though progress was slow.
Ms Lumor spoke on the theme “Telecoms: A critical driver of Ghana’s Economy.”
She said telecommunications had transformed everything in the world and also played an important role in the world economy, such that service revenue of the global telecommunications industry was estimated to be US$1.5 trillion in 2010, corresponding to 2.4 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Challenges impacting telecoms industry
According to Ms Lumor, operators were constrained in respect of investments in new technologies and services; declining revenues may translate to poor service quality; and government tax income is significantly reduced as industry revenues decline.
Also, she said due to multi-simming, actual penetration was lower than current estimates and that a regime that encouraged and promoted investment was required to achieve full benefits of technology.