By Adedapo Adesanya
West Africa’s pioneer solar-based internet and voice service provider, Tizeti, is set to expand its operations within Nigeria and Ghana, and into new neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire and Togo in addition to listing its Nigerian subsidiary.
With over 2.8 million subscribers on its platform, a revenue of over N11 billion over 10 years, and no debt, the firm is exploring an Initial Public Offer (IPO) in the stock market for investors/shareholders while setting its eyes on expanding its footprints across the Francophone and Anglophone countries in West Africa.
This was disclosed by the company’s founder and chief executive officer, Mr Kendall Ananyi at Tizeti’s annual event tagged NeXTGEN 2.0: The Next Frontier, noting that with the broadband gap in Africa still very high, operators like Tizeti must expand to ensure that more Africans have access to reliable, affordable and truly unlimited internet from Tizeti.
According to him, Tizeti has been providing affordable unlimited internet service in Nigeria and Ghana using solar towers which have brought about 30-50 per cent cost savings on data cap plans and made it the preferred option to its competitors.
“This expansion is very strategic for us and for the continent. We have grown significantly within the last few years, being profitable in three out of the last four years and paid our first dividend this year. We currently have over 3884 hotspot locations and built 1 tower every month since we started, with 2.8 million users in Nigeria.
“Today, Tizeti delivers over 190 (terabytes per second) TBPS of data a day, which is about 20 per cent of what Airtel, the second largest telco with coverage in 36 states delivers.
“Using publicly available data on the website of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and our internal data, we are the number one fixed Internet Service Provider by users and active users in Nigeria today and the ISP of the year 2022.
“And there’s still so much room for growth. Internet users in Africa are still about 26 per cent of the total population, with almost 900 million people unconnected. We are now exploring the public markets for equity/debt to fund our next growth phase.
“We have reserved our ticket at NASDAQ, and are exploring London Stock Exchange as we are an LSE-Companies to Inspire, as well as the Nigerian Exchange NGX,” Mr Ananyi said.
Speaking on the Francophone expansion, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Tizeti, Mr Ifeanyi Okonkwo highlighted the increased submarine cable investments in Africa to date, and the absence of middle-mile and last-mile infrastructure that moves the capacity where it is needed.
With Tizeti’s new infrastructure build-out across West Africa, Tizeti plans to bridge the digital divide and bring more Africans online via its unlimited service offering.
“We believe that Africa offers the most significant potential demand for broadband expansion, and we have looked at their populations, their relative contributions to GDP, the prevalence of higher and tertiary institutions, and other pool factors,” said Mr Okonkwo.
The company also launched new connectivity offerings, Tizeti Turbo Connect, which provides up to 150MBPS fibre-connected capacity to homes and offices, for N60,000, and a new technology that allows it to deliver up to 1000MBPS.
The company also announced new energy initiatives that minimize diesel cost consumption with solar panels and wind turbines across its base stations.
