Econet Group — a privately held diversified telecommunications group, has shut-down Kwesè TV, Kwesè Sports, and Kwesè Play. It also shut down its subsidiary company, Econet Media Limited.
Kwesè TV is the company’s pay-TV delivery service. The company took to their twitter page to announce that the company will be shutting down its services on the 5th of August 2019.
PUBLIC NOTICE – Termination of Kwesé TV Satellite Service pic.twitter.com/HCT8nijJCi
— Econet Wireless (@econetzimbabwe) August 3, 2019
The Econet Media Group launched Kwesé in 2015 with the vision to disrupt the African media space. The company grew and expanded across 12 TV markets in Africa. However, in June 2019, Zimbabwe stopped using the US dollar, South African rand and other foreign currencies as their legal tender. This development was as a result of the rising economic crisis in the country.
According to the Group, the lack of foreign currency needed to pay up suppliers affected the market and eventually led to the shutting down of the Company. The company released a statement stating that shutting down the service was a difficult decision which they couldn’t postpone.
See also: Econet Shuts down Video Streaming Service Kwesè Play
The statement read;
Johannesburg – 5 August 2019 – Econet Group regrets to confirm that Econet Media Limited has ceased operations with effect from 5 August 2019. It is a difficult decision that we could not postpone. Over the last 4 years, we sought to disrupt Africa’s media landscape and enable Africa to tell its own stories using a variety of technologies including satellite broadcast, video streaming, and free-to-air TV. The Econet Group invested heavily into Econet Media and supported the business over the period it operated without any third-party funding. Unfortunately, market conditions and content price inflation got in the way of us completing our mission.
We are particularly grateful to all our dedicated staff and contractors who have worked tirelessly to bring a great product to market and who until the last day believed in the Kwesè story. We are also grateful to our customers and our partners who believed in the Kwese vision and who worked with us as we tried to change how Africans consume and pay for media.
We deeply regret the impact that this decision has had on our staff, contractors, customers, regulators and content providers. We will engage with each of our valued stakeholders transparently and will seek to meet our obligations to each of them as provided under the law.
The Econet Group is entrepreneurial and believes in Africa and its potential. Our belief in “an inclusive connected future that leaves no African behind” remains undaunted.
We would like to emphasize and reiterate that the rest of the Econet Group businesses continue to operate normally as each of our companies are separate legal entities with their own management teams and boards.
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