Orange has finalised the acquisition of Cellcom Liberia and rebranded it to Orange Liberia, allowing the Group to reinforce its presence in West Africa.
The acquisition of Cellcom was finalized by Orange, through its subsidiary Orange Côte d’Ivoire, on 6 April 2016.
According to Bruno Mettling, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Orange Group and Chairman and CEO of Orange Middle East and Africa: “The launch of the Orange brand confirms our confidence in the country’s ongoing economic recovery and our commitment to bring all the benefits of new digital services to Liberians”.
With over 1.6 million customers at the end of February 2017, Orange Liberia is the leading mobile operator in Liberia in terms of customers. The firm is now targeting to sign up more customers from the 4.6 million people in the country by investing into network expansion and ccelerating broadband deployment and expanding 4G penetration across the country.
Orange Liberia will also tap into the Group’s submarine and international cable networks and two additional secure connection points in Abidjan and Paris to multiply network capacity by four.
Founded in 2004, Cellcom was the first operator in Liberia to launch 3G (HSPA+) services in 2012 followed by 4G-LTE services in 2016. Orange will pursue this strategy and will continue to invest in the development of its network where the company is already a market leader. Orange is present in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East, where it has more than 120 million customers and recently launched a digital bank to revolutionize mobile money across its markets as its new revenue generator. The Group had 5.2 billion euros in revenues in 2016.
Mamadou Coulibaly, CEO of Orange Liberia, added: “We will invest significantly in network roll-out across the entire country, develop e-recharge in order to ease the constraints of scratch-cards loading, launch Orange Money, a new robust platform to boost mobile banking services in the country. We will as well introduce new highly competitive offers and low cost Smartphones in order to boost digital inclusion. We intend to position Orange Liberia by 2020 as a true catalyst for the digitization of Liberian society”.
