THERE is a version of the NetOne story that looks like a competitive breakthrough. In 2025, the state-owned operator built 389 new LTE base stations, closing its infrastructure gap with Econet from 322 sites to 82.
At its 2024 annual general meeting, chief executive officer Raphael Mushanawani told shareholders the company had already built 259 LTE sites that year and upgraded 500 existing stations, positioning 2025 as the year the investment would start to tell.
The Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) quarterly reports confirm the build happened. They also confirm it produced almost nothing commercially.
When a telecoms operator builds at the pace NetOne built in 2025, subscribers are supposed to follow. They did not. NetOne entered the year with 3 963 193 active subscribers and a 25,28% market share. It closed it with 4 101 492 subscribers and a 24,44% share. The raw subscriber number grew. The share fell by nearly a full percentage point, meaning NetOne added customers more slowly than the market grew around it. Econet, starting the year at 72,29%, closed it at 73,75%. In a growing market, standing still is losing.
Data traffic is where LTE infrastructure is supposed to pay off. NetOne held 18,91% of Zimbabwe’s mobile data traffic market in Q1 2025. By Q4, with 389 new LTE sites commissioned across the country, that share had declined to 18,69%. Econet, simultaneously directing capital toward 5G rather than LTE, carried 81,20% of all mobile data traffic at year’s end. The relationship between site count and traffic share was flat. The towers were not being used.
The explanation is not that NetOne built badly. It is that it built in the wrong places for the wrong purpose. The National Mobile Broadband Programme, a multi-phase initiative financed through China Eximbank concessional loans, was designed from its inception to extend coverage to border areas and underserved communities where Econet’s commercial calculus had long concluded there was insufficient revenue to justify deployment.
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State ownership gave NetOne the mandate and the funding to build where no private operator would. The consequence is that the sites commissioned in 2025 were not predominantly placed where data demand is concentrated. Coverage mandate infrastructure in a low-density rural corridor and a commercially-placed LTE station in a high-traffic peri-urban market are not the same asset, and Potraz does not disaggregate the site count by location or traffic load. The headline figure of 1 743 NetOne LTE stations at year-end is accurate and opaque in equal measure.
The financial context makes any reading of this as a strategic investment harder to sustain. NetOne disclosed a 62% year-on-year revenue increase to ZiG$3,7 billion in 2024, with data revenue up 110%. Operating costs climbed 73% in the same period, and foreign exchange losses amounted to ZiG$11,4 billion, more than three times the company’s total revenue for the year. Those foreign exchange losses are linked in part to the NMBB loan structure: China Eximbank advances denominated in renminbi, sitting on a balance sheet that earns primarily in ZiG.
As of 2024, NetOne disclosed legacy debts of US$328 million, the bulk of it from the NMBB phases that funded the very infrastructure the company is now expanding.
In 2022, Zimbabwe’s acting Auditor-General found NetOne’s total liabilities exceeded its total assets by ZWL$32 billion, recording the company as technically insolvent and flagging material uncertainty about its ability to continue as a going concern. An operator building hundreds of towers while absorbing foreign exchange losses three times its revenue and carrying US$328 million in legacy debt is not accumulating competitive advantage. It is servicing a state mandate and hoping the commercial case emerges later.
The Q2 2025 Potraz data captures the inversion most plainly. In that single quarter, NetOne added 224 LTE sites. Econet added 22. Econet’s data traffic market share rose. NetOne’s fell. Ten times the build rate, in the wrong direction.
Consumers were not switching to NetOne’s LTE network in meaningful numbers, which means the barrier is not coverage. It is something else: pricing perception, network quality in the specific locations where data consumption is heaviest, handset compatibility, or the depth of Econet’s commercial entrenchment across mobile money, data bundles, and enterprise services. The Potraz data cannot say which. It can only confirm that towers are not converting into customers.
None of this would matter quite so much if LTE were the future. It is not. Econet closed 2025 with 340 5G base stations against NetOne’s 26, a 13:1 ratio in the technology that will carry enterprise services, fixed wireless broadband, and the next generation of mobile commerce. NetOne spent 2025 narrowing an infrastructure gap that Econet had partly vacated in order to fight a different war.
Whether the company can redirect the same capital discipline into a 5G programme, in a financial environment of ZiG$11,4 billion in annual foreign exchange losses and US$328 million in legacy debt, is the question 2026 will begin to answer.
The 389 new LTE sites in a year is a serious infrastructure commitment from any operator in any market. In Zimbabwe, in 2025, it moved NetOne’s data traffic share by negative 0,22 percentage points. That is the number the towers produced. Everything else is construction.
- Muhamba is a business analyst, market analyst and the AMH Group chair’s executive assistant. — valentinem@alphamedia.co.zw