Data wars have yielded customer satisfaction but the same satisfaction cannot be reflected in telecoms books of accounts due to cheaper internet bundles – this according to Uganda Revenue Authority.
The resortment to using cheaper voice and data bundles has seen Telecom’s revenues decline thus reducing the taxman would be share.
This has seen telecoms drop from being one of the biggest tax payers in the country as opposed to the heydays when voice was their biggest revenue earner through airtime purchases by the end users. And as such, there was a drop in airtime tax which ranked them among the top brass of taxpayers in Uganda. All this was addressed to journalists by the URA Commissioner General in the tax body’s ongoing “Be Served by the Commissioner General” campaign.
It is no secret that the advent of the smartphone which uses mostly data, has seen voice revenues shrink as people resort to over the air apps like Whatsapp, Viber, Messenger etc to communicate and to drop the bombshell, make calls. This can be done at a paltry of the cost had they decided to use just airtime to communicate lets say through SMS and traditional calls. A few telecoms have been able to overcome this by diversifying into Mobile Money but still voice is their dying savior followed by Mobile Money and data comes a distant third.
Why is this the case?
Recently MTN’s CEO Wim Vanhelleputte shed some light as to why data is expensive and why data only providers are said to be struggling.
Whereas these struggles are far from over, it is believed that overtime data will bring in the biggest chunk of revenues that’s if smartphones prices go down and heavy data use cases become more prevalent.
