MTC stakes its claim

MTC is the most affordable service for those who intend to contact the biggest cellphone community in Namibia with 1.1 million 081 users. Miguel Geraldes, Managing Director of Namibia’s biggest cellular service provider, said in spite of the recent actions from Cell One, including referring to “research” without mentioning the studies made, nor even the comparative advertising done withholding the true picture, MTC is not only the cheapest in Namibia, but definitely one of the most affordable in Africa.

Since MTC has the largest customer base, customer segmentation has been used to better address the specific needs of certain segments of the market. A “one-size-fits-all” approach does not suit MTC customers, Geraldes explained. MTC’s Prepaid (Tango) product line has four standard classes of services as follows:

• Standard where pricing is offered as per minute;

• Tango Night & Day per minute – designed for regular prepaid uses who want lower rates;

• Tango 7 to 12 – designed for the heavy user who makes long calls and sends 100 free SMSs between the hours of 7 pm to 12 pm; and

• Tango Special Rate – designed for the heavy user who wants to send free SMSs all day. A further two classes of service were created by MTC to address the needs of more than one million pre-paid subscribers, he added. The first was designed for tertiary education students such as those at UNAM and the Polytechnic.

MTC will offer it to secondary students too in the next months. The second was developed with the HomePhone product, designed for families who require an additional cell phone at home with very low rates to MTC and very similar rates to fixed lines (and in some cases even better).

The final product is Tango Per Second, and as the name suggests, it is billed in per second increments. This class of service was not designed to address any specific need nor special segment of the market, but was to offer customers a product where they paid only for the seconds they speak. In brief:
Therefore the tariffs of MTC for contacting more than 1.1 million customers – at peak times – as MTC has illustrated before, represents less than 40% of the total traffic of their network, are from N$0.19 to N$3.60 depending on which class of service the customers choose.

This can be compared to the N$1.79 to N$2.40 that the second mobile operator is charging to their customers to contact the same 1.1 million MTC costumers, Geraldes said. “But more important than rates for peak traffic, are the nights and weekends representing more than 60% of total traffic on MTC,” he added.

It is important to note that more than 60% of MTC’s customers are in classes of services designed for heavy users, including Night & Day, Tango 7-12, Tango Special Rate and StudentPlan. In addition to this enormous advantage that MTC costumers enjoy, MTC has – since November and every month thereafter – been running traffic promotions, or tripling the airtime, or giving MTC customers the opportunity to contact the entire MTC community for a specific number of hours per day in exchange of a small fee of N$5.

For example, in the November 2008 campaign, from 9 to 17 November, more than 21 million minutes, representing 34% of the traffic of the pre-paid customers in November, were offered for free. In January this campaign was repeated ending on Tuesday with 28 million minutes offered completely for free.

In December’s Summer Nights Campaign customers called for 11.5 million minutes during the 23 days of the campaign paying N$5 per evening. The total that MTC charged was only N$759 000, representing a price per minute of merely 6.6 cents, Geraldes said. However, probably the best value that MTC is currently giving their customers are free SMSs.

“Daily MTC is giving away more than 10 million SMSs for free.” “Noting all these offerings, MTC is certain that it is offering the best value for money to its customers,” Geraldes said. He said MTC is sure that customers fully understand the value they receive.

“The best proof of that is where they continue to use MTC products and services, and in a recent survey conducted in Namibia by the prestigious South African research firm, Synovate, MTC is the preferred cellular service provider of the Namibian people in terms of all of aspects including quality of service,” Geraldes said.