👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – 9mobile? T2, please

Nine years. Two rebrands. And a struggling telecom trying to claw its way back to the big boys’ league.

Nigeria’s fourth-largest (and smallest) telecom company, once Etisalat and later 9mobile, is now T2. 

The déjà vu is hard to miss. In 2017, Etisalat’s $1.2 billion debt crisis prompted a hurried name change after its UAE parent withdrew its support. That bought time, not stability. Investor confidence never returned, leadership kept changing, and subscribers fell from more than 22 million to 2.4 million today.

What happened? The company never recovered from Etisalat’s exit in 2017, its largest investor and majority owner. As a result, 9mobile’s network investment slowed, while rivals improved, and the telecom’s market share shrank to under 2%. New products such as 9 payment service bank (9PSB) and youth-focused branding failed to stop the losses.

State of play: A year after Lighthouse Telecoms took over, T2 is pitching a “bold new chapter” built on four pillars: speed, smart Living, digital lifestyle, and trust.

In its evolving approach, T2 is aiming to become capital-efficient under new owners. The company has previously stated that it plans to “build where it must, and share where it can,” indicating a shift to an infrastructure-light model, similar to what South Africa’s Cell C is doing.

The real change is T2’s three-year national roaming deal with MTN, the first of its kind at scale in Nigeria. T2 customers can now roam on MTN’s network, closing years of coverage gaps in rural and underserved areas. This will free T2 from the weight of building and owning more infrastructure, to focus on customer experience.

What’s at stake? With new owners, T2 now possibly has a capital pipeline it could not have imagined a year ago. The challenge is to turn that into loyalty by targeting youth, enterprises, and digital-first users while keeping prices competitive with other mobile operators. 

If Cell C’s turnaround is anything to go by, T2’s rebrand and operational refresh could be the rebirth it’s been looking for; yet it risks being another facelift if the telecom fails to tackle deeper, operational issues it now controls.

Zoho, an Indian enterprise software company that has touted itself as an affordable alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, will launch its new LLM model to its African customers by the end of 2025. 

No extra cost: Zoho is once again using its tried and tested cost-effectiveness technique to attract users with its new LLM launch. The enterprise ‘no extra cost’ perk for ZiaLLM makes their offering more attractive to an African business trying to use enterprise AI tools without going completely broke. 

Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprises is offered at an extra $31.50 per user each month in addition to current Microsoft 365 costs. Let’s do the maths. If a company has 100 employees, that’s at least $37,000 in extra costs for using Copilot alone!

Zoho also claims Zia LLM is ‘privacy-first’ and not trained on top of any third-party LLMs like ChatGPT, meaning that the finance or HR department in a Nairobi-based company can use it to draft invoices or contracts without worrying about revealing sensitive business data to these other providers. This has been a common concern for institutions like banks, worried about securing their sensitive data. The model is built on NVIDIA’s hardware and is optimised for specific tasks like data extraction, summarisation, and code generation. 

Zoom out: As more companies on the continent embrace AI adoption to improve staff productivity, they’re in search of affordable alternatives to Big Tech models like Google Gemini and ChatGPT that can also guarantee data sovereignty. Zoho hopes to be that alternative with Zia LLM. The new product could help Zoho accelerate its growing position in Africa’s enterprise software market.

Egypt’s economy is seeing green again after the Central Bank (CBE) reported that the banking sector’s weighted loan rate is declining. It fell from 26.6% to 25.4% in July, making loans slightly cheaper for borrowers.

This is all thanks to the CBE’s aggressive rate cuts. Between April and July, the central bank cut benchmark rates twice by a total of 3.25%, incentivising banks to also lower their rates.

Egypt’s inflation also eased for the second consecutive month in July, by 100 basis points to 13.9%, on the back of declining food prices.

What does this mean? Lower lending rates mean households and companies can borrow more affordably, which tends to encourage spending and investment. 

Between the lines: Egypt’s private sector loan growth accelerated to 12.6% in Q2, with services and trade turning positive after years of contraction. Lower financing costs are encouraging companies to expand, hire, and launch new products without fear that interest payments will eat away at profits.

The big picture: With average deposit rates falling to 18.8%, keeping money in savings accounts could also become less attractive (due to low yield). This will drive savers to invest in stocks, bonds, or small enterprises for better yields, which can stir more investment and job creation across the economy.

A win for the economy is a win for the government: Short-term rates are dropping faster than long-term ones, flattening Egypt’s yield curve. Investors see this as a signal to commit funds for longer, making it easier for the government to raise money for infrastructure without constantly refinancing.

All these shifts point to one thing: Egypt’s numbers are improving, stimulating the economy for growth. With these developments, the CBE could resume cutting benchmark rates on August 28 when its monetary policy committee (MPC) meets again after July’s pause.