Safaricom’s Mpesa continues to dominate other players in the mobile money transfer sector, leading its competitors, Telcom T-Kash and Airtel’s Airtel Money with a 98.8% market share.
According to statistics by Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), Airtel’s Airtel Money comes in second at 1.13%, while Telcom’s Tkash a distant third with only 0.07% of the market share.
The report also shows that the number of active registered mobile money subscriptions stood at 28.9 million and the number of active mobile money agents stood at 175,959. These are finding for last quarter of 2019 starting October and ending December.
These are finding that come at a time when Mr. Joseph Ndegwa takes over the reins of Safaricom as Kenya’s first CEO.
Speaking to the media, Mr. Ndegwa noted that there were still growth opportunities for Mpesa owing to the fact that it is Safaricom’s largest earner. His words echoed that of his predecessor, Michael Joseph, who last month reaffirmed the mobile money transfer service’s importance to the organisation’s business saying that M-Pesa continues to be a key contributor to the listed company’s profits.
Mpesa continues to bring in revenue to the company, a fact cemented by last year’s financial results, which showed that Mpesa accounted for 75% of its Ksh63.4 billion profit.
Declining Voice Traffic
According to the Communications Authority report, there was a drop in the voice traffic by 16.2 % during the same period. 14.9 billion minutes of calls were made against 17.8 billion minutes posted during the previous period.
The decline was attributed to drop in on-net voice traffic from 16.1 billion recorded last quarter to 13.2 billion during the quarter under review.
The report reads, “The justification provided by the operator was that they had been summing incoming and outgoing on-net traffic in previous quarters instead of providing outgoing traffic only considering that ideally only outgoing traffic is billed.”
On the say note, mobile to fixed voice traffic declined by 7.0% to record 14.7 million minutes attributed to the continued shrinking of fixed network subscriptions.
While fixed voice traffic decreased, off-net local voice traffic increased by 0.5 percent to post 1.73 billion minutes from 1.72 billion minutes recorded during the previous survey period. The report also shows that the average number of minutes per month was 91.5, a drop of 19.5 minutes compared to the previous quarter.
During the same period, total number of short messages sent were 15.6 billion down from 17.2 billion messages recorded during the previous quarter. There was also a drop in the number of SMS per subscription per month to 95.4 messages from 107.6 recorded during the previous quarter.
In the mean time, traffic originating from and terminating to other countries increased during the period under review to stand at 144.4 million and 111.3 million minutes respectively.
