Now that 9Mobile is back on the news, I want to refer everyone to this piece. It is more about strategy than pricing and quality. Simply, even as you pursue quality, you cannot out-price your customers. Data does not lie: as of June 2020, MTN had 79 million subscribers; Glo and Airtel followed at roughly 52 million each. 9Mobile had only 12 million, down more than at least 8 million from its peak. Simply, that pricing is not doing it, and the company has to revisit many things including the concept of MVQ.
The deal is this: the construct of quality has no meaning until the price of the product is put into considerations. I always ask entrepreneurs to build for the Minimum Viable Quality (MVQ) bounded by the product target price which market will respond. You can build rockets to fly around the world: that is an engineering possibility. But does that make a business sense if no one can afford it? Ask the makers of Concorde for answers.
That brings me to Glo and 9Mobile (nee Etisalat NG) services: Glo continues to grow with its highly affordable service while 9Mobile struggles even with better service but at higher cost. I am not saying that you do not have to pursue the best possible quality you can. My point is that any quality metric without a price construct is meaningless.
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