borkena
Toronto – Ethiopia’s largest state-owned telecom company, Ethio Telecom, on Friday announced that it will be selling 10 percent shares to the public.
According to local sources, it will be selling shares as of next week. They will be available on Ethiopia’s stock exchange which was launched this year before Abiy Ahmed’s government announced the devaluation of Ethiopian Birr as part of his “home grown” macro-economic reform.
Ethio Telecom is poised to be the first company to sell its shares on the Ethiopian Stock exchange. It is part of Ethiopia’s privatization scheme – which the government has been packaging as “home grown economic reform” – that Ethio Telecom is selling shares to the public. Investors are invited to buy shares but no further details are available at this point.
Until 2022, Ethio Telecom was the only telecom service provider. It was during that year that Safaricom started operating in Ethiopia , and has reported about five million subscribers in those years.
Ethio Telecom has been diversifying products over the past for many years now.
With well over 100 years since its establishment, Ethio Telecom has been one of the major revenue generators for the Ethiopian government. It has over 78 million subscribers as reported this year and is planning to generate over 163 billion birr revenue during this fiscal year. It also has plans to increase the number of subscribers to over 83 million by the end of this fiscal year. If the planned revenue is achieved, it will be in the vicinity of about 25 percent of the country’s government budget. It remains a question, however, whether Ethio Telecom will be able to boost revenue in light of worsening economic hardship for the majority of Ethiopians.
During the fiscal year that ended, it paid 27.2 billion birr in taxes to the government for which it was recognized in an event organized for “honest tax payers”. The company announced that it has paid over 120 billion birr in taxes over the past six years.
The state owned company also makes tens of hundreds of billion birr in net profit.
Its revenue has been impacted over the past six or so years due to the ongoing war first in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, and now in Amhara and Oromia regions. There are still areas, especially in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, that are under restrictions.
__
Join our Telegram Channel : t.me/borkena
Like borkena on Facebook
Add your business to Ethiopian Business Listing / Ethiopian Business Directory
Join the conversation. Follow us on X (Formerly Twitter) @zborkena to get the latest Ethiopian News updates regularly. Subscribe to YouTube channel To share information or for submission, send e-mail to info@borkena.com