BTC sets sights on market growth
Mbongeni Mguni | Tuesday December 16, 2025 11:27
The Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) has unveiled bold plans to gain a greater foothold in the market. The country’s smallest mobile telecomms player by market share, is coming for everything from data services, to network coverage, mobile money and others.
The plan
New CEO, Jürgen Peschel, who took over the hot seat in July, is brimming with confidence that the telecomms group can achieve its market expansion targets, transforming from a previously reactive organisation to an “agile, performance-driven and customer-focussed” dynamo.
The German national, a telecomms veteran, has prior experience leading a public sector telco in his home country into the private space and combined with his years spent at Nigeria’s fourth largest mobile company, he believes he has the tools to drive the change required at BTC.
“The focus and the theme mainly will shift from current stabilisation into acceleration,” he told Mmegi in a recent roundtable. “We have ambitions to much faster and much more grow our financial parameters and grow our business. “We are going to build on the gains of the past year to position BTC into a stronger and much more competitive business.”
While BTC is the country’s oldest telco, having borne the burden of spreading fixed telephony across the country in decades past, it has run behind its peers such as Orange and Mascom in the new era of mobile telephony, mobile money and other innovations.
While the BTC was privatised in a historic Initial Public Offer in 2016, bringing on more than 40,000 citizens as shareholders, analysts blame the group’s public sector origins for the lethargy in innovation over the years.
Peschel, using his experience with the German telco, is determined to change the trajectory and has the board’s support with a new transformation strategy.
“We have moved away from the old style, old hierarchical model with slow decision making, deep hierarchical structures,” he said. “BTC is on a trajectory to becoming much more digital, much more customer centric and becoming a performance driven organisation.”
Peschel’s plans, as endorsed by the board, include leveraging on the BTC’s leadership in the enterprise business, investing further into the growth and depth of the mobile network, expanding the fibre network, scaling digital services, deepening coverage of the mobile money product and continuing with the development of human capital in the group.
BTC is not starting from the ground floor in its ambitions. The telco already has the country’s largest fibre network and in expanding its mobile coverage, its investment this year was up 20%, with plans for a further 10% increase in budgets for next year.
The investment in the spread and depth of the network supports the plans for data services and the mobile money product.
“We are investing into the country at unprecedented level and we are investing the most in the market,” Peschel told Mmegi. “That should not only underpin our ambitions for growth but also our commitment to provide wealth and economic development. “This positions BTC to support the gradual increase in data usage and the gradual increase in use of digital services across the economy.”
On Smega, the mobile money product, the CEO explained: “We are going to build the largest everyday payment ecosystem in this country. “We are going to open up Smega for non-BTC mobile customers, so that everybody in Botswana can use it regardless which ISP or which operator they are on. “Every Motswana will be able to use Smega for their everyday lives, for all of their needs and we would have bridged the financial inclusion gap.”
The hurdle
The BTC’s ambitions to catch up to its peers in the market have long been hamstrung by the fact the market is largely based on mobile subscriptions and most customers are reluctant to change their phone numbers. Mascom and Orange were established in 1998 when the first mobile licences were issued, while the BTC’s own unit, then known as beMOBILE, came into operation ten years later in 2008.
In the year ended March 2025, according to data from the regulator, BOCRA, BTC had a 14% market share in the mobile voice market, compared to 46% for Orange and 40% for Mascom.
A major game changer would be Mobile Number Portability (MNP), which would allow mobile users to retain their mobile telephone numbers when changing from one network carrier to another. MNP is favoured by smaller, upcoming networks, which are challenging for market space, such as Cell C in South Africa. After the introduction of MNP in that country in 2006, Cell C reported that at one point it was raking in 6,000 customers from its rivals every week.
In Botswana, MNP has been a stop-start affair since it was first mooted more than a decade ago. In 2021, after a six-year readiness assessment, government announced that MNP would not go ahead as the “operator network readiness assessment study had shown that it was not feasible”.
On Thursday, BOCRA announced a restart of the process, floating a tender for consultancy services to assess the “regulatory impact assessment of MNP”.
“The regulatory impact assessment shall primarily consider portability on mobile numbers but will also include VoIP and fixed services,” the BOCRA tender reads. The tender is due to close on January 14, a quick turnaround and possible signal of more momentum being given to the MNP initiative.
For Peschel, MNP cannot come any sooner.
“What you want to achieve as a regulator is competition because competition ensures that you will ensure two things: best customer experience and lowest prices. “As soon as you have working competition, automatically those competitors amongst themselves can only excel if they improve on those two fronts. “And then automatically over time you will have better customer experience and gradually lower prices,” he said.
The CEO said MNP was live in most markets around the world and in Botswana it would remove the artificial block on tariffs and improvements in customer experience. Rather than the regulator enforcing lower tariffs and higher quality, greater competition through MNP would achieve the same result, without the need for browbeating.
“It will instantly, instantly decrease prices and it will instantly increase customer experience without BOCRA needing to force reductions in tariffs,” Peschel told Mmegi. “Since I arrived, I have not understood why mobile number portability doesn’t exist. “If you had purchased a line with any operator 10 years ago, today you would be proud to retain this line for the simple reason that all your peers and all your contacts know your number. “You would never consider changing your number for the simple reason that this number is known and the number is you. “So, this is an artificial block against competition.”
With MNP, a subscriber at one telco, can move to another with better tariffs or services, without changing their number. The 4.2 million mobile voice subscriptions recorded as at March 2025, would coalesce into a smaller figure distributed in the market according to competition over pricing and quality of service.
The prize
Going into his first full year, Peschel is buoyed by his early successes. This week BTC’s share price hit a seven-year high buoyed by recent strong financials and the transformation strategy.
The telecomms veteran is continuing with the focus on building a high performance culture and a customer-centric approach within the organisation.
You inspire, you hold people to account, he says when Mmegi asks where the carrot ends and where the stick starts in terms of achieving results with an institution such as BTC.
“You can't just come with a whip or come with a declaration and say this is how it's going to be done. “You will instantly get opposition and so the approach needs to be an agile one. “But equally, we have just introduced a new performance management system that will set out clear performance targets at the beginning of every quarter, then have quarterly feedback reviews, and then at the end of the period, have an assessment of performance achievement. “This makes it clear, transparent and implemented in writing and also sets performance targets. “It’s not about carrot and stick. “But sometimes you need both.”