Telkom’s mobile division had a good 2017 and a successful festive season.

“We’ve grown exponentially in the last year,” said Telkom’s managing director for consumer and mobile Attila Vitai.

The network ran a 12 Days of Christmas promotion over the December holidays in partnership with Samsung, and Vitai said they were blown away by the response.

He said he visited several malls across Gauteng during that period and found that on any given day, there were nearly always more people in Telkom’s retail shops than in all their competitors’ shops combined.

One of the reasons the response was surprising was that Telkom ran specials on higher-end deals.

“If you look at the ARPU of the deals we were advertising, they were extremely high,” said Vitai.

Average prepaid ARPU in the market is R50 to R70. On postpaid, it is between R180 and R280, he said.

“The products we were selling were way over those averages – more than double.”

Success

Telkom’s success with its 12 Days of Christmas promotion led it to launch a promotion for Chinese New Year, offering Huawei smartphones on 24-month FreeMe contracts at reduced prices.

Vitai said the promotion has once again started strong, with statistics from the first three days looking positive.

2018 is going to be an important year for Telkom, he said, as they have plans to stimulate data usage on their mobile network, increase network capacity, and add more subscribers.

While Vitai said they are not in double-digits yet in terms of mobile subscriber market share, they are growing well and expect this trend to continue.

He said that in a meeting with YouTube, who Telkom partners with on its LIT Video service, the company said they have never seen an operator grow in smartphone market share as Telkom has.

“Our numbers are no longer the numbers you would expect from a fourth operator,” said Vitai.