One of the key questions about the financial performance of the Botswana Telecommunication Corporation (BTC) is that revenue — the money it earns from customers — has not grown as quickly as all its investment spending.
At the end of March 2025, BTC had P442 million left in its cash reserves, down from P625 million the year before.
The main reasons were two things: paying out dividends to shareholders at P269 million, and spending on new technology.
The latter is the most pressing:
- It spent around P277 million on equipment and upgrades during the year, growing its network assets from P1.51 billion to P1.64 billion.
- It also spent P306 million on investments, far higher than the P55 million it spent the previous year.
What the company spent on these is about 40% of the company’s sales, showing how serious the company is about building its network. The company uses its own metrics, Return on Capital Employed (ROCE), which measures how well it uses its money. CFO said it has improved from 4% in 2023 to 7.5% this year. That suggests the investment is working.
But Paya said BTC is not only about getting more money in, but also about protecting its profits. If the network is better, customers will stay, and the business can keep making money.
“We are not only chasing top-line, but we are also chasing margin resilience,” she said. “It’s easy to lose it.”
The messaging from Paya was that “we will go and fetch the revenue, we will deliver margins”.
Network As Excellence
Keeping customers happy is key to stopping churn, the rate at which people switch to other providers. Paya warned that if BTC’s network is not excellent, it will struggle to compete.
Most of BTC’s money went into new fibre technology, which helps deliver faster internet and can handle more people using it at once. BTC’s finance boss, Abel Bogatsu, said customers are demanding better speeds and lower delays, so the company has to keep upgrading.
Every year, or every few years, we have a new technology coming on board. So we have to decommission the old technologies and bring in the new technologies. So you see that our investment in terms of capex remains quite high.
Bogatsu explained.
Why Spend So Much Now?
Spending heavily before seeing the money come back is not unusual for a telecoms company. BTC’s Paya calls this “front-loading” the spending. She reminded investors that back in 2017, BTC also spent a lot to roll out 4G. BTC plans to keep spending between P250 million and P300 million over the next two years, mostly to remove old equipment and install modern systems.
Customers Want More
So why put in all this money? The main reason is that customers expect more. Many people now depend on the internet. They want it to be fast, affordable, and available everywhere.
Paya told investors that BTC is seeing structurally higher demand for data and the shifting customer expectations are putting the company under pressure.
“They’re saying we need affordable, accessible data. We need coverage everywhere. We need high-speed, low-latency. And therefore, we have to respond. We did targeted infrastructure investments because it’s tough.”
BTC’s leaders know that if they do not meet these demands, customers could leave. Paya explained how BTC is trying to reach more areas with 4G, especially since it already has the widest 2G network in the country.
