[ 2017-05-22 ]

CEO of Vodafone Ghana, Yolanda Zoleka Cuba

Dumsor hit Vodafone Ghana badly - CEO
CEO of Vodafone Ghana Yolanda Zoleka Cuba has said
the erratic power situation which persisted in the
country until recently cost the telecom company a
lot.

Ms Cuba, who was made CEO on 1 May 2016 told
Accra-based Citi FM in an interview that: “It
was really difficult,” operating within the
dumsor period.

“In reality, all cells actually work on
electricity, so, if there is no electricity, it
actually interrupts the quality of service that we
can provide to our customers and that is the
essence of the story.

“… More than that, it also impacted on how we
allocate our budget. So, instead of saying we are
going to build more south sites, we ended up
having to invest in generators. And then it
actually increased our operating cost because now
you actually have to run on diesel so the ongoing
cost of diesel has been going on even now,” she
said.

“Unfortunately,” she added, “you can’t
switch of generators because you don’t know when
there will be power instability like we saw about
a week ago. We actually had our generators luckily
so we are not as badly impacted but it always
impacts.”

She said “eighteen months ago, we spent most
probably in the region of about 12-18% of our
total cost on power related issues,” adding that
the power crisis “actually negatively impacted
our consumers.”

She explained: “Obviously, the first thing is
that your consumers cannot charge their phones. So
we actually told consumers to get these ‘Double
Decker’ phones that they could use for three
days at a time so whenever they had power, they
had to make sure they charge and that sort of
bridges consumption and that actually does not
help the industry and does not make the industry
more sustainable over the long period of time.

“So, what we actually did is we had spent a long
time actually educating the consumer on how to be
confidently connected, how to actually consume
throughout the day, and then we see consumption
changing somewhat because people actually had to
charge when they had power and talk when they have
power so those kind of things actually impacted
from the consumer perspective. But from our side
as well what ended up happening is we couldn’t
get generators for all sides at the same time. And
everyone was trying to get generators into the
country so you actually had to prioritise your
load. So obviously that impairs customers
negatively from a quality and reliability of
service. Because for me at the end of the day,
it’s when someone is trying to call an
ambulance, when someone is calling a loved one for
a favour and the service is not there at the time
that is when you really feel the nuisance factor.
It’s much better now. I must be honest even with
what happened a week ago, I didn’t feel it was
severe although it was a national blackout but
because we actually had some infrastructure , it
actually helped as well,” Ms Cuba noted.

Source - classfmonline.com

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