Ralph Mupita, head of the largest pan-African telecom group MTN, wants his South Africa-based telco to draw inspiration and attract more investment from China.
On the investment side, Mupita recently partnered with the Chinese state-back Silk Road Fund that funnels investment to projects along the Belt and Road as part of MTN’s bid for one of Ethiopia’s newly available telecom licenses.
Now, he wants to evolve MTN from being a pure-play telco operator into a full-fledged payments and communication ecosystem similar to Tencent’s WeChat platform in China using MTN’s Ayoba app. “We want to create a WeChat for Africa,” he told The Africa Report in a recent one-on-one interview:
THE AFRICA REPORT: Are you following Chinese app WeChat’s strategy with Ayoba?
RALPH MUPITA: Yes. Over time, we are looking to integrate mobile money onto Ayoba. We have a huge mobile-money base — 46 million subscribers — to try and create a composite of the two and create a bit of a WeChat recap. It will consist of many channels where we make some of the content available for free, and charge for others. We want to create an ecosystem of merchants where mobile commerce can take place.
To be successful in creating this type of architecture for services and channels on Ayoba, and link it to mobile money, we will create a mobile commerce system that can accelerate the growth of the app and enhance that through the concept of a WeChat for Africa.
Read the full interview with Ralph Mupita on The Africa Report website.
