ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) -Ethiopia’s state-owned Ethio Telecom reported sharply higher annual profit on Thursday, driven by an expansion of its network and more customers.
CEO Frehiwot Tamiru said pretax profit for the year ended June leapt more than 80% year-on-year to about 76 billion birr ($550 million).
The company, which the government is privatising as part of a wider liberalisation of the tightly-controlled Horn of Africa economy, held an initial public offering that closed early this year but sold only 10.7% of the shares on offer.
The sale was restricted to Ethiopian citizens, with a 1 million birr limit on shares that any one investor could buy.
The firm’s total number of subscribers rose 6.3% to 83.2 million during the year, while subscribers to its financial service Telebirr increased 15.3% to 54.8 million, Frehiwot told a press conference.
She added that, following several months of delays, Ethio Telecom would soon be listed on the Ethiopia Securities Exchange, which launched a secondary market for trading treasury bills and equities earlier this month.
Ethiopia’s telecoms industry, serving a population of about 120 million, was considered a big prize when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took over in 2018 and promised to open up the economy.
It has attracted interest from several foreign companies, including Kenya’s Safaricom, which won the country’s first private telecoms licence in 2021.
However, Abiy’s plans for the economy were interrupted by a bloody two-year civil war in the country’s northern Tigray region, which ended in 2022.
($1 = 137.9315 birr)
(Reporting by Dawit Endeshaw. Editing by Elias Biryabarema, Hereward Holland and Mark Potter)
