Show me the money!

Just for fun, from a really basic standpoint…………….

SAS are looking at facilitating the connection of up to 4Billion people who currently have little / poor or no phone connection at all. They’ll do this by selling access at wholesale rates to existing mobile phone providers who will on-sell (retail) to their respective subscribers.

I am not going to repeat the study I did months ago (and posted here) on current mobile usage in Africa and the respective monthly costs per subscriber. Suffice to say by comparison to what we pay, I reckon their costs are pretty darn high considering their average monthly incomes.

Nigeria alone has about 25 million mobile phone users = http://allafrica.com/stories/201607080930.html

“eMarker believes that inexpensive smartphones are opening new opportunities for marketing and commerce in emerging markets like Nigeria, where many consumers previously had no access.”

Cheapest Call rates in Nigeria – https://naijnaira.com/tariff-plans-...-to-international-and-local-nigeria-networks/

2017 Cheapest Call Tariff on MTN Network, Features and Benefit.
"The best tariff plan on MTN network is iPulse. It is formally Mtn pulse and it is their most advertised plan ever. The call rate on MTN Pulse is 11 K/S. You will be charge #12 per minute for the first 50 seconds of the day. This means about 14 and half minutes of call for #100 Naira."

That’s about 42c Aust for 14 and a half Minutes of call time .
Then add on some fractions of a cent for data use if you want!


Let’s cut the subscriber numbers down to only 1 Billion connections, not 2, 3 or 4 Bill.

Let’s say after all the operational costs are taken into consideration, that SAS makes an overall profit of just 1 cent per subscriber per month. That’s 1c total for the month…. Not per call or per min of call time….. just one measly cent outright per subscriber per month.

If that 1c is too high, please let me know. If you think that is way too little – I don’t care! – do you own sums.

Here are my sums………..

1c / month x 1billion subscribers = $10Mill per month. = $120,000,000pa

If we managed to get just one cent per call from each subscriber and they made just one call per day, that’s 30c per month…… and let’s give them FREE data!

1c / call, based on only one call per day = 30c / month x 1 billion subscribers = $300,000,000 per month = $3.6BILLION per year……………… PROFIT.

Do your own sums and see what you get! – whichever way you do it. There’s a lot of money to be made connecting people!



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