NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct 15 – Safaricom has lost its market share by 1.6 percentage points to close the fourth quarter at 65.4 percent down from 67 percent in the third quarter.
Sector statistics from the Communications Authority for the period between April and June 2018, reveals Airtel and Telkom Kenya gained by 1.7 and 0.2 percentage points to end the quarter at 21.4 percent and 8.8 percent market share respectively.
Finserve Africa lost 0.1 percentage points whereas the market shares for Sema Mobile and Mobile Pay Ltd remained unchanged.
The total revenue earned by mobile service providers increased by 8.5 per cent to Sh252.3 billion in the past twelve months to June 2018.
The figure is cumulative revenues from voice, data, SMS, mobile money transfer services, mobile termination rates, roaming charges, infrastructure leasing and handsets sales, among other services provided by mobile network operators.
Voice remains the dominant revenue generator at 41.7 per cent.
“It is evident that the revenue ratio of traditional mobile voice service is dominant at 41.7 percent of the total revenue,” reads part of the report.
However, mobile data and mobile money services show strong growth prospects and might constitute promising revenue streams for the mobile services providers in the future.
As at 30thJune 2018, the number of mobile service subscriptions in the country stood at 45.5 million, translating to an increase of 13.2 percent when compared to the 40.2 million subscriptions recorded as at 30th June 2017. This marked a 9.1 percent increase in penetration in the financial year.
High-speed fibre subscriptions doubled during the financial year 2017/18 to stand at 135,964 from 54,700 subscriptions posted last year driven by high demand for high video definition streaming and increased competition among service providers.
Mobile subscriptions hit 97.5 percent to 45.5 million with pre-paid and postpaid subscriptions registering at 44.3 million and 1.19 million respectively.