Portugal Telecom launches Sapo Mozambique
Friday, February 20, 2009
After Cape Verde and Angola, Sapo reaches Mozambique. PT proceeds swiftly with the internationalisation process of the leading Internet portal in Portugal, launching Sapo Mozambique today – www.sapo.mz, a portal aggregating local information, assuming itself as a meeting point of the Mozambican community worldwide
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Zeinal Bava and Armando Guebuza,
President of the Republic of Mozambique |
Sapo jumps over international borders, arriving today, 20 February, in Mozambique. PT, in partnership with Millennium BIM and BCI Fomento banks, together with companies MCELL, TDM, LTM (Telephone Directories of Mozambique) and Visabeira, launches Sapo Mozambique, a portal aggregating content thought out and produced in accordance with local reality.
As of now www.sapo.mz will be the connecting link of the Mozambican community. It will be possible to access all the information on Mozambique from anywhere in the world and stay in touch with what is happening in the country. The new portal will put together its own content, produced by local people, adapted to the Mozambican reality.
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Venâncio Massingue, Minister of
Science and Technology, Zeinal
Bava and Mário Machungo, Chairman of
the Board, Millenium BIM |
With this launch, Portugal Telecom proceeds with its internationalisation strategy, promoting Internet use and Portuguese-language content production.
The main Mozambican media, namely Rádio Moçambique, Televisão de Moçambique, Sociedade de Notícias, Jornal Savana, Grupo Soico and Agência de Informação de Moçambique will supply content for the portal, i.e. for the Sapo News Network.
The Sapo News channel ensures the availability of videos, photo galleries, reportages, interviews, apart from news aggregation from all Mozambican media as well as updating by the minute.
As of today www.sapo.mz will provide an email platform with a Mozambican domain: @sapo.mz. The portal will also provide specific areas such as: Search, Videos, Photos, Blogs, Classifieds and Messenger, besides thematic channels: Sapo Kids, Sapo Viajar, Sapo Sabores, Sapo Astral and Palco Principal.
At the same time of the rollout of www.sapo.mz, aiming to reinforce the stimulation of the Information Society, the Minister of Science and Technology presented today a project of distribution of 1,000 Magalhães PCs in the primary schools all over Mozambique, with the support of Portugal Telecom, Millennium BIM and BCI Fomento. All these portable PCs will include MIT’s Scratch software, adapted to Portuguese by PT, direct access to Sapo Kids application, apart from Internet access so as to encourage kids to use technology as a learning tool.
It should be recollected that Scratch is a free application enabling the child/student to create his own animated projects, stimulating creativity. It was adapted to Portuguese and the Magalhães PC by Sapo and Portugal Telecom, in cooperation with the North-American University and will be available cost-free in every Portuguese-speaking country, being Mozambique the first country to receive this initiative.
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In the first row, Zeinal Bava, Armando Guebuza and Venâncio Massingue. In the second row, Abílio Martins and founding members of Sapo Mozambique portal |
Sapo targets Portuguese-speaking countries
Sapo was born in 1995. In the course of the last thirteen years, the set of webpages built by six students of the University of Aveiro, acquired by PT, became the major Internet portal in Portugal.
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Featuring tools and content entirely in Portuguese, the Sapo Portal maintains the leading position in Portugal and rivals international portals such as Yahoo! or Google. Numbers are significant in 2008: 29 million visits and 75 million pageviews make Sapo the leader in terms of the most visited pages in Portugal.
At European level, the numbers also reveal Sapo’s success, reaching a share of audience of 92 percent in terms of operator portals, higher than other European operators with a maximum of 64 percent, such as the case of Orange, Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom. In terms of video audience, Sapo reached a 46 percent viewings share.
Throughout the years, Sapo has always led the market in terms of initiatives, leveraging the rollout of new products and content. A few successful initiatives are worth highlighting:
• Sapo celebrated its 13th anniversary in September 2008. A mark in the history of the Portuguese portal;
• In November 2008, portal Sapo’s content – News, Pharmacies, Traffic, Weather, Newsstand, Stock Exchange, Totoloto and Horoscope – became freely available on Meo, PT’s television service;
• In January 2009, the Sapo portal beat new records with the largest livecast ever made in Portugal. 69,000 people accessed portal Sapo’s Virtual Stadium to watch match Naples vs. Benfica. Soccer initiatives have not been confined to this match. Sapo will livecast 16 matches of the Sagres (Premier) League, as the result of a partnership between PT, RTP and Sportinveste.;
• Sapo rolled out Sapo Kids in January 2009, a project aggregating educational and entertainment content in Portuguese, dedicated to children aged between three and thirteen years old. The big novelty will be the availability of Scratch on Sapo Kids, new programming software for children created by the MIT. With Sapo’s initiative, Portugal becomes the first country to have a local Scratch application, in Portuguese.
2008 saw the internationalisation of Sapo towards Portuguese-speaking countries, resulting in the launch of Sapo Cape Verde portals - www.sapo.cv in April, Sapo Angola - www.sapo.ao in July and Sapo Mobile in Brazil.
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Sapo has gone overseas, contributing to content production growth in Portuguese language. The two new portals, aggregating Cape Verde- and Angola-related content respectively, produced exclusively by local partners, aim to be a connecting link and meeting point of Cape-Verdean and Angolan communities worldwide.
Crossing borders once again, Sapo arrived in Brazil, where its mobile version was launched in June 2008. Sapo Mobile, whose navigation is similar to the portal version, enabled Brazilian users to access videos, search engines, movies, traffic, horoscope, weather forecast, among other services.
Africa, a bet on long-term growth
Africa, a driver of growth and profitability, assumes a strategic importance for Portugal Telecom, where it has been present in the last 20 years, holding subsidiaries in Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, S. Tome and Principe, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Morocco and Kenya. The weight of the African assets in PT’s net income attained 17 percent in 2008.
These operations showed very positive results in 2008, driven either by the dynamic markets in which PT already is, or by the assumed strategy of sharing best practices among the subsidiaries of the Group. This has induced the rollout, for example, of Office Box in Namibia, of the triple-play (voice, data and TV) offering in Cape Verde and the creation of the Sapo portals in Cape Verde, Angola and now Mozambique.
In 2008, strategic investments on the African continent translated themselves into numbers of success, such as the case of the 25% growth in the customer base, especially in Angola with 38% and Namibia with 25% growth as compared to 2007. Highlight should also go to the remarkable increase in Angola in terms of revenues, exceeding 40 percent.
Portugal Telecom’s international strategy is ambitious and marked by the growth and the quality of execution and value creation of its subsidiaries. To consolidate its position on the African market, PT has constituted a holding in 2007, aggregating its sub-Saharan operations, together with a major strategic partner, Helios, thus creating additional options to finance its regional growth.
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