Econet Founder and Executive Chairman, Strive Masiyiwa, has revealed that he is no longer interested in mobile network licenses.
Speaking to Invest Africa CEO, Karen Taylor on their YouTube Channel, Masiyiwa said he has not invested in a mobile network over the past 10 year.
I haven’t invested in a mobile network for the past 10 -15 years. That was done, its finished. If you bring me a mobile network licence, I will stick it on a noticeboard and laugh at you, because that is not what we are in.
We are about building the next generation of digital infrastructure. We have invested in building fibre networks across Africa. We have over 100 000km of fibre that we built ourselves. We completed Cape to Cairo about 5 years ago and we have now reached Dakar.
We have just done one of the most complicated builds, which was to go from the Atlantic coast, through the DRC, in partnership with Facebook and Google. We have now built all the way to Dar Es Salaam, cutting through the Congo Rain Forest.
So we are laying down this Digital Infrastructure, but then we have also built data centres, and we are building data centres in all the major cities of Africa at the moment. We have a project that we call Project Decima. We have bought land in ten of the largest African cities.
We have to build cloud, we have to prepare for artificial intelligence, we have got to be there. Otherwise African can not remain a competitive place.
Please watch the video above this post for more details.Â
