While many mobile operators around the world are under pressure as people make fewer phone calls and the competition on data pricing being increasingly stiff − Kenya won’t have it. Even though it has been more than a decade since mobile money came onto the scene in East Africa – mobile money in Kenya is far from old news.
For Safaricom, Kenya’s by far biggest mobile operator, mobile money revenues accounted for 27% of total revenues by year-end 2017, and reached 28% as of May 2018.
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However, Safaricom has continued to develop its digital services by expanding far beyond traditional telecoms territory in order to drive mobile money usage. Late last year the company launched its own e-commerce platform, Masoko, that also features Safaricom’s M-Pesa mobile money service as the main payment method.
The operator has been keen to establish a foothold in a potentially high-value market segment in this middle-income economy before international giants such as Amazon enter the market.
On another front, Safaricom is currently in the trial stages of a social media/chat platform app which, of course, also incorportates the company’s highly successful money transfer service, according to GlobalData, a London-based research firm.
