Safaricom’s share of voice market drops as Airtel, Orange gain

Corporate News

A mobile phone user. Safaricom's share of voice market has dropped by 3.8 percentage points in the past year. PHOTO | FILE 

By OKUTTAH MARK, mokuttah@ke.nationmedia.com

In Summary

• Industry data shows company has ceded ground to its rivals as market share drops in past year.

Safaricom’s share of the mobile phone communications voice market has dropped by 3.8 percentage points in the past year, as the company ceded ground to rival telcos Airtel and Telkom Kenya.

Industry data released by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) on Friday revealed that Safaricom’s share of the voice traffic had dropped to 74.1 per cent in the 12 months to end of June, down from 78.8 per cent a year earlier.

Airtel’s market share by voice traffic grew to 16.4 per cent up from 10.7 per cent, while Telkom Kenya’s market control more than doubled to 7.1 per cent, up from three per cent recorded at the end of the previous year.

“The total terminating local mobile voice traffic registered for the whole year increased significantly by 11.5 per cent to stand at 34.2 billion minutes up from the previous year’s 30.7 billion minutes” said CA in the report.

Safaricom’s customers, however, increased their talk time, raising the minutes count by more than one billion to 24.8 billion minutes recorded during the year.

Airtel’s total traffic volume stood at 5.4 billion minutes compared to 3 billion minutes recorded the previous year.

During the year under review the Minutes of Use (MoU) per month per subscriber increased to 84.9 representing a 5.4 per cent growth compared to the same period of the previous year.

The report noted that the market share gains recorded by Airtel could be attributed to its acquisition of the yUmobile business while Orange’s gain is attributable to the migration of its wireless landline (CDMA) subscribers to the mobile (GSM) network.

READ: Safaricom future value linked to M-Pesa growth

Equitel (Finserve Africa Limited) which has operated for barely nine months now recorded on-net traffic of 2.8 million minutes during the quarter up from 2.3 million minutes posted during the previous period.

Traffic to other mobile networks stood at 19.7 million minutes during the quarter. Equitel’s market share stood at 0.2 per cent at the close of the year.

The harmonisation of voice roaming tariffs within the region helped to grow regional traffic. During the quarter under review, roaming-out voice traffic stood at 26.5 million minutes.

Roaming traffic within EAC countries contributed to 23.3 million minutes while non-EAC countries contributed 3.1 million minutes.

The total number of roaming out messages was registered at 8.3 million, with EAC countries contributing 4.8 million messages.

The total roaming-out data stood at 2.3 million MB. Roaming-in voice traffic registered a total of 19.5 million minutes during the period under review. EAC countries contributed 15.6 million minutes while non-EAC countries contributed 3.9 million minutes.