Kenya’s mobile market has continued to grow steadily, supported by a mobile subscriber base of about 47 million. Some market consolidation occurred following the acquisition by Airtel and Safaricom of Essar Telecom’s yuMobile business. More significantly, in February 2019 Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya signed an agreement to merge their networks and operate under the Airtel-Telekom joint venture which will be 49% owned by Telekom Kenya. The merge units will provide a greater challenge to the market dominance of Safaricom.
While all network operators have invested in mobile technologies and infrastructure upgrades to support mobile data services, competition has nevertheless presented challenges to their profitability, with uneven revenue growth reported in recent years. Orange Group was the principal casualty of competition, leading it to sell its stake in Telkom Kenya. By contrast, Safaricom has seen very strong growth on the back of its popular M-PESA payment platform. This dominance encouraged the government to consider, and later dismiss, recommendations that Safaricom split off its M-PESA business from its voice and data offerings.
To encourage the development of LTE services the government has pursued an open-access approach. Disputes centered on licence fees delayed the launch of LTE services by MNOs, though they continued to invest in infrastructure and technology upgrades using trial licences.
Safaricom, Bharti Airtel (formerly Zain, Celtel), Essar Telkom Kenya, Huawei Technologies, ZTE, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Networks, Mobile Pay (Tangaza Pesa), Zioncell Kenya, Finserve Africa (Equitel)
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Number of pages 71
Status Current
Last updated 3 Jul 2019
Update History
Analyst: Henry Lancaster
Paul, May I congratulate you on a very successful and enjoyable afternoon with the Minister. In providing the roundtable discussions between government and industry, it highlighted the strong interest by stakeholders in Broadband and its implementation but it also presented us with other issues and opportunities that we need to address.
Dominic Schipano, CITT
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