Profile of the Telecoms market in Kenya – part 4

See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6

MARKET SHARES

Mobile subscriber unit market shares

Based on operator returns to the regulator the following were the unit market-shares by operator during the quarter.

                                          Share             COMMENT

Safaricom                          71.9%          up slightly to 29.49mn from 29.23mn

Airtel Kenya                     14.9%         down slightly to 6.10mn from 6.18mn

Telkom Kenya                    8.4%         up significantly to 3.44mn from 2.90mn

MVNO  Finserve/Equitel   4.7%          up moderately to 1.91mn from 1.86mn

Mobile Pay Ltd                   0.2%          up to 0.089mn from 0.088mn

Sema Mobile                    Negl

Mobile money transfers market shares – by money transfer system

NB There are 184,137 agents involved of which 143,126 support M-Pesa

It is not clear why Airtel Money has such a low value for transactions  There are additional figures on mobile commerce transactions and Airtel seems relatively stronger in that sector though not obviously enough to justify the difference

Fixed/wireless data/internet subscriptions market shares

 NB This covers all non-cellular data internet sectors

SECTION 4 —Short profiles of the main operators

Safaricom

Safaricom was started in 1993 as a department of the former state-owned telecommunications company,Kenya Post and Telecommunications Corporation but is now owned 35% by Vodacom of South Africa(which is owned 65% by Vodafone of the UK), 35% by the Kenyan Treasury, 5% directly by Vodafone of the UK and 25% by the general public.

Safaricom provides a wide range of integrated residential and business telecommunication services, including mobile and fixed voice, SMS, data, Internet and M-PESA, a service to send and receive money or pay for goods and services through a mobile phone.

Due to Safaricom’s dominant share of the Kenyan mobile market, there have been frequent calls for the company to be broken up into separate retail and wholesale companies and for some time the CA was said to be considering whether Safaricom had abused its position and whether its various businesses should be disaggregated. Finally, on January 4th, 2018 the CA announced that it had decided not to take any action on this issue.

Safaricom is Kenya’s most profitable company and claims to support over one million workers directly and indirectly. For the year to March 2017, Safaricom reported revenues of KSh 212 billion.

For the first halfyear of 2017/18 ended September 2017, Safaricom reported good growth boosted by a strong performance by M-Pesa and data while traditional services such as voice remained resilient.

Specifically

1. Total revenues rose 12.1% to KSh114.43 billion(=$1.110 billion)supported by

-M-Pesa revenues up 16.2% to KSh30.05 billion

-Data income up from KSh13.4 billion to KSh17.55 billion.

-Voice revenue, which is still Safaricom’s biggest income stream, up from KSh45.7 billion to KSh47.35 billion.

-Messaging revenue up 3.4% to KSh8.92 billion.

2. PAT grew 9.5% to KSh26.2 billion for the six month

Safaricom is a key contributor to the Kenyan Treasury through its payment of substantial taxes and dividends. In mid-December 2017 the Central Bank of Kenya in its weekly bulletin reported that the company had just paid KSh16.2 billion($157.3 million at KSh.0097 to the dollar) dividend to the Kenyan government.

In early September 2017, Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore, speaking to the Financial Times of London said the company was planning to market some of its services , notably Masoko, a service which combined e-commerce and mobile payments to four or five of its neighbouring countries, including Ethiopia, though he admitted the latter initiative might not be easy given the limited private sector in that country.

As of late 2017, Safaricom was reported to have provided FTTH services to 81,000 homes in 19 neighbourhoods in Nairobi including South B and Pangani as well as Ngong and Rongai in Kajiado County.

On December 11th 2017, Safaricom announced that for the first time ever, Kenya had achieved the milestone of 1 million active 4G customers in customers. Safaricom is currently the only operator providing LTE commercially. It said the milestone was achieved following network expansion, increased affordability of 4G smartphones and more affordable data bundles.