Under a deal with the Moroccan government, the company, 53% owned by Etisalat, will spend the money – 10 billion dirhams or $1.04 billion – over the next three years.
The company said: “This investment programme aims to develop and strengthen the telecommunications infrastructure, the deployment of mobile and fixed high and high speed broadband and the creation of new jobs in Morocco.”
This is the sixth in a series of investment agreements between the company and the government, which announced in June that it would sell up to 8% of its stake in Maroc Telecom. Previous agreements allocated the company a total of 58 billion dirhams ($6 billion at current exchange rates) in investment.
Maroc Telecom has a 43.8% share of the Moroccan market, which is growing at 2.37% a year, according to figures published in March by the regulator, Agence Nationale de Réglementation des Télécommunications (ANRT, National Telecoms Regulation Agency).
Maroc Telecom’s own results for the first half of 2019 show it has almost 63 million customers, up 3.9% in a year. Mobile data revenues went up 19.7%.
