Vodafone calls for urgent solutions to power crisis
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Telecom Company, Vodafone is impressing on government, the need to fix
the power crisis as soon as possible.
According to the company, this is important to avert the negative
impact on its operations as well as government revenues. The company
says the crisis has already almost tripled the company's cost on fuel,
compared to last year which has unduly led to a sharp decline in
revenue.
The Head of External Affairs, Gayheart Mensah has been outlining the
underlying factors to Joy Business.
"People are not buying scratch cards and they're not making calls
because they don't have their devices to use for most part of the day
because there's no electricity and we are seeing the impact of this on
our revenue.
"The potential impact is on the quality of service that we deliver to
our customers. You need also to look at it from the point of view of
cost of production. The telecom industry relies a lot on energy. All
our sites that you see across the country – the masts, the 3G sites
that we build and all that are powered by energy.
"When there is a challenge with energy as we have today, we have no
choice but to rely on diesel which is even more expensive. It is
impacting on our cost of production and again having an impact on the
revenue that we're generating."
According to him, this is only a wake-up call for government to
urgently address the power crisis to forestall possible far-reaching
economic consequences.
"When businesses operate and generate profits, that is what enables
them to invest a lot more in their operations and so when you don't
have your power generation right for such an industry, it affects
investment decisions. We don't need to under-estimate the potential
impact of this on government revenue because revenue that we generate
as telcos, as businesses, across various industries are the very
revenues that feed into government revenue.
"We do appreciate the enormous efforts that government is putting in,
in order to address this issue. But to the extent that we're still
going through the challenge, we'll continue to urge government to
expedite all initiatives that they have in order to resolve this issue
quickly" he concluded.
Credit: Myjoyonline