Movitel, a Mozambican-Vietnamese partnership and Mozambique’s third mobile telephone operator, officially started operating Tuesday and already 415,000 pay-as-you-go customers, according to the company’s chairman cited by the Mozambican press.

Movitel – a partnership between Mozambique’s SPI – Gestão e Investimentos (20 percent), Ivespar (10 percent), a subsidiary of the SPI group and Viettel (70 percent), which is 100 percent owned by Vietnam’s Defence Ministry – has so far invested US$177 million of the US$400 million it initially announced and has installed 12,500 kilometres and 1,800 base stations for the 2G and 3G network.

The company, which plans to provide every kind of service that can be offered via a mobile platform, and with the Internet as a starting point, wants to cover 80 percent of the Mozambican population in the first three years of business and attract 10 million customers, particularly in rural areas, by the fifth year.

Speaking Tuesday in Maputo, the chairman of the company, Safura da Conceição, said that Movitel currently accounted for 70 percent of Mozambique’s fibre optic system and noted that the company’s network covered 105 of the country’s 128 districts and had managed to attract 415,000 pay-as-you-go customers without paying for a single advertisement. (macauhub)