{"id":40742,"date":"2013-06-27T07:01:51","date_gmt":"2013-06-27T05:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=40742"},"modified":"2013-06-27T09:45:32","modified_gmt":"2013-06-27T07:45:32","slug":"nashua-mobile-ceo-on-orange-potential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/telecommunications\/40742\/nashua-mobile-ceo-on-orange-potential\/","title":{"rendered":"Nashua Mobile CEO on Orange potential"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nashua Mobile<\/a> CEO, Mark Taylor<\/a> says that the group\u2019s deal with Orange taps into as many as half a million potential customers coming into South Africa annually.<\/p>\n

On Thursday (13 June) Orange announced a partnership with Nashua Mobile, to open its first retail outlets in SA outside of its current operator footprint.<\/p>\n

Both the online and physical stores \u2013 totaling\u00a0four in three cities, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria \u2013 will offer SIM cards from the Orange footprint, starting with France and Botswana.<\/p>\n

These will be marketed in particular for professionals or tourists travelling from South Africa to countries in which Orange is already present.<\/p>\n

“We have incoming into this country in excess of 500,000 Orange customers per annum. They don\u2019t have anywhere to go and get serviced at the moment,” Taylor said.<\/p>\n

The chief executive said that he hoped the overseas visitors would bring family and friends into the store for \u201cadditional spin-off\u201d.<\/p>\n

Taylor also pointed to a future scenario which would see locals needing an Orange SIM when travelling abroad.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will offer our customers an Orange card for when they go overseas, because I\u2019m tired of our customers being ripped off \u2026the international roaming rates are obscene. There is absolutely no reason for it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

“We like the concept of the partnership. We will see how much we like each other. If they decide to come in as an MVNO, potentially we could do the billing and collection service for them,” the company lead said.<\/p>\n

“Will we drive it as our main service? Absolutely not,\u201d he stressed, noting Nashua\u2019s current strong relationship with Vodacom<\/a>, MTN<\/a>, and Cell C<\/a>. \u201cWe are also busy evolving our relationship with Telkom at the moment,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cFor us, it\u2019s all about choice.”<\/p>\n

Looking outside of SA?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Taylor said that Nashua Mobile plans an aggressive roll out of its retail distribution. With a current total of\u00a0150 (retail stores), he said that the group would like to\u00a0position\u00a0itself in another 50 malls in the next two years.<\/p>\n

When questioned if the group would look to enter territories outside of SA, Taylor said: “Currently we are spending millions in revamping our systems. Our systems are old, they aren\u2019t at the level where they should have been\u2026we’ve replaced our mainframe, our servers, and now we are busy replacing our front end services.”<\/p>\n

“Once that is done there is absolutely no reason why we couldn\u2019t. Its whether it makes economical sense to become a service provider for Econet in Zimbabwe, we could even potentially become a provider for Orange in Botswana, or for Vodacom in Mozambique,” he said.<\/p>\n

“If we are going to play in that corporate space\u2026.there is no reason why we couldn\u2019t, but it wont happen for the next 24 months.”<\/p>\n

More on Nashua Mobile and Orange<\/h3>\n

Nashua Mobile\u2019s bold retail ambition<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

We want to be a virtual operator in SA: Orange<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Orange teams up with Nashua: report<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nashua Mobile CEO, Mark Taylor says that the group\u2019s deal with Orange taps into as many as half a million potential customers coming into South Africa annually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":23530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[42,6159,26,2827,28,5358,551,27],"class_list":["post-40742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-telecommunications","tag-cell-c","tag-econet","tag-headline","tag-mark-taylor","tag-mtn","tag-mvno","tag-nashua-mobile","tag-vodacom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40742"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40746,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40742\/revisions\/40746"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}