Orange’s Managing Director in Africa and the Middle East, Alioune Ndiaye, said in an interview with Jeune Afrique that Wave has had a detrimental impact on jobs formerly created by Orange.
“The model of Wave is disruptive because it is financed by venture capital funds, which are not very attached to short-term profitability. They invest money in the hope that the start-up will manage to take over the entire market and that at that time they will be able to sell their share by recovering 10 or 15 times their initial investment.
“It resembles the Amazon model: we burn cash – this lasted more than ten years for the e-commerce site – hoping to kill the competition (…). With Orange Money, Orange has created tens of thousands of jobs thanks to the network of distributors that we have developed to bring our services closer to our customers. Half of the turnover went to them”.
But, “Wave made them lose 50% of their income. Some 20,000 jobs have been destroyed in Senegal, we may lose as many elsewhere,” he laments.
However, the former CEO of Sonatel, who is not opposed to the principle of competition, says that “the arrival of fintechs on this market is completely normal and helps us to improve as well”, he acknowledges.