BY MTHANDAZO NYONI
STATE-OWNED telecoms operator, TelOne, has recovered $60 million from debtors to date after employing a number of debt recovery methods, an official has said.
The parastatal, owed more than $264 million by various players across the economy, including the government, said to date it has collected $59,886 million from debtors.
TelOne’s corporate communications manager, Melody Harry, told NewsDay in emailed responses that they employed various collection debt methods such as door-to-door visits, decentralisation of the collection process to their respective exchanges, sending reminders to customers through a variety of channels and promotions, where customers are rewarded for paying their bills.
Harry said the company has started benefiting from the network modernisation project it is currently rolling across the country.
“Yes, through the project, TelOne has increased voice and broadband capacity in order to cater for the growing demand for service. Customers are signing up and we are broadening our presence in the market, witnessing a revenues increase of 2% compared to same period prior year,” she said.
“The coming of prepaid voice now means we are much more in control of our collectables and the business is assured of cash revenue. The network modernisation programme is expected to yield more results as more exchanges and clients are migrated to the new platform.” Harry said new bundled services, that cater for individuals, Small to Medium Enterprises and informal markets, will also be introduced soon and are expected to significantly increase TelOne revenues.
Last year, TelOne embarked on a National Broadband Project in which the company is targeting to increase broadband contribution to 48% of total revenue by 2020, up from the current 20%.
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To date, Harry said the company has drawn down $54 million from the China Exim Bank’s $98 million facility.
She said the company has also launched a state-of-the-art data centre which is a sub-project of the National Broadband Project.
The data centre offers services such as co-location, disaster recovery, back-up and storage, bandwidth rental and a diversity of cloud services for government institutions, corporates and individuals who process big data.
“This has widened the revenue channels for the company, while also providing the much needed data storage facilities for the whole country,” she said.
Harry said TelOne’s ongoing network upgrade has seen the introduction of new and exciting value-added services that include toll-free service, interactive voice response service (IVR), video and audio conferencing.
“More services are lined up to be unveiled in due course,” she said.
Furthermore, she said through the commissioning of the Bulawayo-Beitbridge Backbone Fibre, the company will soon be realising a reduction of up to 40% in bandwidth landing costs.
“The project has been completed and the link is already up. An official event will be held in due course. The link is set to cut internet landing costs by up to 40% further strengthening TelOne’s drive to deliver cost effective internet to all Zimbabweans” Harry said.
