How does this company make money?
Millicom collects a monthly fee from subscribers paying for mobile voice and data plans, and charges per use for international calls and SMS. In markets where it also runs fixed-line infrastructure, it collects monthly cable television subscription fees. On top of that, every time someone uses Tigo Money to send money to another person or pay a merchant, Millicom earns a transaction fee.
What makes this company hard to replace?
A Tigo Money wallet holds stored value and a history of past transactions and merchant relationships that cannot be picked up and moved to a different financial platform — a customer who leaves starts from zero elsewhere. On the phone side, number portability rules in markets like Guatemala and Tanzania can require a waiting period of thirty to ninety days before a customer can move their number to another network, making switching slow even when someone has decided to leave.
What limits this company?
Before Millicom can extend its network into a new area, it needs tower construction permits, updated spectrum allocations, and approvals for cross-border fibre routes — a process that takes twelve to twenty-four months in countries like Tanzania and Guatemala, where new subscribers are already arriving faster than coverage can expand. Because a Tigo Money wallet only works where there is a cellular signal, anyone living outside that coverage zone simply cannot become a customer until the permits clear.
What does this company depend on?
Millicom cannot operate without telecommunications licences from COMTELCA in Central America and from national regulators in each African market. It also depends on spectrum allocations in 2G, 3G, and 4G bands from those same national authorities, leased fibre backbone from submarine cable operators that connect Latin America and Africa to the global internet, tower site agreements with local landowners across rural Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Tanzania, and Ghana, and international gateway licences that allow data to move between its operating territories.
Who depends on this company?
Rural customers who use Tigo Money for digital payments and sending money home would lose access to those services entirely if the mobile networks went down, because in many areas there is no alternative way to move money digitally. Local resellers and mobile virtual network operators in each market buy wholesale network access from Millicom to run their own retail services, so a Millicom outage would knock them offline too. Government agencies in the operating countries also rely on Millicom's coverage for emergency communications and administrative connectivity in remote areas.
How does this company scale?
As more subscribers join the network in a single city — like Guatemala City or Dar es Salaam — the fixed cost of the towers and fibre is spread across more people, so each user becomes cheaper to serve. What does not get cheaper with scale is the regulatory work: every country requires its own local legal entity, its own licensing relationships, and its own compliance operation, regardless of how large Millicom grows overall.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
When local currencies in Latin America or Africa fall against the US dollar, Millicom collects revenue in weakening local money but must pay for imported network equipment in stronger dollars, squeezing what it can actually invest. China's Belt and Road Initiative is building new fibre infrastructure across Africa, which could change what Millicom pays for wholesale internet connectivity and alter the routing options available to it. IMF programmes in some operating countries have pushed governments to liberalise their telecommunications sectors, which can affect how spectrum is allocated and how much foreign ownership is permitted.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If a national regulator — for example Tanzania's Bank of Tanzania or Guatemala's Superintendencia de Bancos — decided that mobile money counts as deposit-taking or payment-institution activity and required a standalone banking licence for it, Millicom would have to apply for that licence country by country or sell off Tigo Money in that market. The entire advantage of the model is that no separate banking licence is needed; a reclassification removes that advantage directly.
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