Thursday, November 14, 2013
The company makes some $40 million in
turnover annually, although the average revenue per user is a mere $2
from its 2 million subscribers, Yuusuf said.Since
2005, the firm has lost more than 50 employees to the shelling and
gunfire that have bedevilled Mogadishu and much of the Horn of Africa
country for 22 years.
Fighting
has eased markedly of late since Islamist al Shabaab militia were
driven out of Mogadishu, with life for many Somalis quieting down and
many diaspora Somalis coming back, but sporadic guerrilla attacks
persist.
"We face a lot.
The biggest problem is anarchy from those in confrontation," Yuusuf told
Reuters on the sidelines of AfricaCom, an annual industry conference in
Cape Town.
"If a site is burned, we repair it without claim, without complaint, that's it."
Hormuud
has 2,000 sites across central and southern Somalia and has laid a
terrestrial fibre network in Mogadishu to speed up connections. It is
now part of international terrestrial links connecting to neighbouring
Kenya through a cable.
Hormuud
expects call and data costs to drop by 50 percent once that link is
fully functional, which is expected to happen soon. The company, which
already offers 3G connections, will start trials on a 4G network in 2014
and expects data charges to be only $0.03 per megabit, a third of the
current cost.
Yuusuf said
45 percent of his 5,000 employees are Somali engineers, although he has
to import skills for sophisticated work once in a while. Most of the
time, vendors can access the network remotely, reducing the risk of
kidnapping or being caught in crossfire.
The
company has 5,000 shareholders made up of Somali speakers, whether from
the diaspora or ethnic Somalis in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. Hormuud
has been paying dividends since its third year of operation, he said.
Although
it does not have a formal taxation and regulatory regime, the
peripheral costs of operating in an environment such as Somalia are much
higher than what a normal telecom would have to pay, Yuusuf said.
Every site employs at least five people for security, just to get some buy-in from the local community.
"Oh my god! We have more than taxation, everybody is taxing us," he said. "Taxation is just maintaining the community."
(Reporting by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura; Editing by Ed Stoddard and Mark Heinrich)