NetOne’s rebranding and aggressive promotion of its mobile money service OneMoney resulted in its subscriber base increasing by a massive 542.9 percent. This was revealed by the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe’s (Potraz) Telecommunications Sector Performance Report For 2017.
In 2016, NetOne company had only 8 234 active subscribers and this number shot up to 52 940 subscribers in 2017. All three mobile money services recorded growth in the number of active mobile money subscriptions with Telecel’s TeleCash increasing by 60.3 percent from 49 549 to 79 429. The country’s biggest mobile money company, Econet’s EcoCash recorded growth of 41 percent from 3,245,405 to 4,574,409.
However, despite the massive growth in users, OneMoney’s active users are a fraction of those of Ecocash. OneMoney has a market share of only 1.7 percent while EcoCash has a market share of 97.2 percent. TeleCash holds the remaining 1.7 percent of the market share.
Recently EcoCash has allowed NetOne and Telecel users to register for EcoCash. This comes a few months after Minister of ICT and Cybersecurity Super Mandiwanzira issued a directive ordering the three mobile money services to become interoperable and allow the seamless transfer of money from one service to another.