Kenya: Mobile giant Safaricom sees profit jump
Date
11/6/2015 6:49:12 PM
(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) Kenya’s giant mobile network operator Safaricom late on Thursday announced a 23 percent jump in profit in the first half of the 2015 from the same period in 2014 the company said in a statement late on Thursay.
Safaricom earned a profit of $176 million on revenue of $952.4 million in the first six months of 2015.
Speaking at the results announcement Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said that despite the high inflation caused by the weakening of the Kenyan shilling against the dollar the company still retained its position as the most profitable company in Kenya.
“Most of the growth that you are seeing did not come from the mobile voice revenue; we got most of the profits from our mobile banking and mobile data services and our messaging services” Bob Collymore told businessmen and reporters on Thursday.
Eric Musau a business analyst at Standard Investment Bank told the Anadolu agency: “Despite the state of the economy the company has performed very well. They have focused on retaining their customers and attracting new ones.”
“Providing cheaper and affordable smartphones is the key to increasing Safaricom revenue as the customer relies on a smartphone to make almost all transactions on the Net. In this way by attracting over 3.25 million new customers and setting the price of a smartphone at around $40 the company is headed in the right direction.”
Safaricom's mobile banking platform M-pesa transacted $24 billion in the six-month period.
“Our non-voice revenue which is SMS data and M-pesa was driven up by customer growth. Free cashflow is down in the first half but this was due to supplier payments and our accelerated network bills” Collymore said.
About 75 percent of the company’s active customers are using mobile data according to Collymore. The company decided to retain its loyal customers by reducing the cost of data bundles by 30 percent he added.
“Our average price for data is among the cheapest if not the cheapest in Africa” Collymore added.
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