MTN Group, ranked as Africa’s most valuable brand at $9.3 billion, distributes custom-branded ReadySets to increase its revenue by powering off grid customers’ phones, with the goal of powering over 1 million households by 2014.

Powering subscribers at Africa’s largest telecom

Based in South Africa, MTN is Africa’s largest telecom with over 183 million customers across 21 countries. MTN is also the largest brand in Africa, and the 83rd most valuable brand in the world. While the company’s subscriber base has grown to record numbers, it has suffered declines in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) due, in part, from a lack of electricity access among its customers.

In the emerging markets where MTN operates, the GSM Association estimates that 600 million people own phones but do not have electricity in their homes. The organization projects that increasing these users’ access to phone charging represents a potential increase of $3.37 billion in annual revenues for telecoms.

Building MTN a custom energy solution

In 2009, Fenix began collaborating with MTN Uganda to design an off-grid energy solution that could power communications devices and be sold through the telcom’s distribution network. MTN is Uganda’s leading telecom with 48% market share and 7.7 million subscribers. However, only 9% of the country’s 28 million citizens have access to the electric grid.

The product’s features were defined by the needs of rural East African entrepreneurs and built upon learnings from existing local energy solutions. Fenix produced initial prototypes and conducted a series of successively larger pilot studies from 2009 to 2011. Over the course of 2010, iterative engineering and manufacturing development resulted in a production-ready, product: The ReadySet Power System.

In MTN-led pilots, ReadySet entrepreneurs demonstrated significant results:

• Overall, 14%+ increase in ARPU and up to 50% increase in mobile banking transactions
• $42/month increase in phone charging revenue
• $29/month increase in MTN MobileMoney agent commissions
• $10/month in savings from using the ReadySet light instead of dangerous and expensive lighting fuels like kerosene, parrafin, and candles

Commercial launch

Following the successful piloting of the ReadySet, MTN Uganda engaged in an exclusive c

o-branding and distribution contract with Fenix.

MTN commercially launched the ReadySet in Uganda in December 2011, with limited regional scope and targeted marketing. Over the course of 2012, Fenix and MTN began scaling sales and launching marketing campaigns, including producing radio endorsements in local languages and featuring a short documentary about a ReadySet entrepreneur named Annette on Ugandan television in sharing her experience as a power entrepreneur.

Scaling revenue and income generation

- By end of 2011, over 2,000 ReadySets had been distributed in Uganda.

- Each MTN ReadySet empowers an entrepreneur to become a micro-utility to their communities.

- ReadySet entrepreneurs are in turn:

• powering 100,000 off-grid mobile subscribers (each ReadySet keeps 50 phones charged in a community),
• providing an estimated 5.2M phone charges per year
• generating ReadySet entrepreneurs more than $1.5M in income each year
• and saving subscribers over $2M each year in charging expenses.

The World Bank has published that every 10 phones added per 100 people increases GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points, which is $134M in Uganda alone, further highlighting how the ReadySet has the potential to catalyze not only large revenue increases for MTN, but also for significant socio-economic development.

Expanding to new MTN Markets

In late 2011, MTN began launching the ReadySet in commercially in Rwanda, demonstrating validation of a scalable business model for using the ReadySet to power MTN’s revenue growth through device charging.