M-Pesa, Safaricom’s mobile money transfer service, added an extra two million customers despite growing competition in the sector. Statistics from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK) show that as at July 2014, its client base stood at 19,776,056, up from 17,561,999 in the same period last year. Its agents, too, increased from 72,546 in July 2013 to hit 80,230, close to three times its nearest competitor, Airtel.
Airtel, its closest competitor, shed off 1.3 million subscribers from its Airtel Money platform in the period under review. In that time, however, the Bharti-owned firm intensively grew its customer base, backed by 10,990 agents in the country. The CAK fourth quarter report shows that Essar Telecom-owned YU mobile, which recently bowed out of the local market due to intense competition, had lost 144,334 of its customers to 2,147,139 by the time it sold its infrastructure and customers to Safaricom and Airtel respectively.
On the other hand, the French owned Orange Money substantially added its customer base to 185,463 up from 166,114. It had the highest increase in the number of agents to 9,231, more than tenfold from a mere 645 it had in July 2013. Safaricom announced that in the first six months of its financial year, the M-Pesa platform attracted more than Sh6.6 billion in retail payments per month. In addition it said payments via Lipa Na M-Pesa from customers to businesses grew 45% to close at Sh16 billion per month. “M-Pesa revenue grew by 24.5% to Sh15.6 billion and now represents 19% of our total revenue in the period under review,” said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore.
Moving forward, however, analysts believe that when the industry regulator conducts a similar survey next year, Safaricom is likely to have taken a beating from its rivals who were only recently handed a lifeline by CAK when it ordered Safaricom to open up its vast agent network to its rivals.
Following the July order, customers from the rival networks who withdraw money from M-Pesa agents will no longer be treated as unregistered customers serving a two-fold purpose: saving them money and encouraging cross-network transactions. With the more investment towards increasing agents by all the players, competition should intensify.
Leave a comment