Communications Commission of Kenya offices along Waiyaki Way in Nairobi. FILE
Mobile operator Safaricom's move to increase call tariffs in October led to an 18 per cent drop in voice traffic within its network in the three months to December, contributing to a significant decline in the industry’s traffic.
Data from the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) show that mobile traffic declined to 6.70 billion minutes in the quarter to December compared to 7.09 billion minutes in the same period a year earlier.
This emerged despite a six per cent growth in the mobile phone subscriptions in the country to 20.08 million—pushing the penetration rate to 71.2 per cent from 67.2 per cent in the same quarter in 2010.
“This was as a result of increase in tariffs by a key mobile operator that led to the reduction in local mobile traffic,” said CCK in response to the drop in voice traffic.
Safaricom lost share of the voice traffic market by 10 percentage points to 77 per cent, giving room to its competitors whose calling rates are lower to grow their stakes.
Airtel gained 6.24 percentage points to record 12.79 per cent market share from 6.55 per cent recorded during the previous period.
Essar Telecom (yuMobile) grew its share to 8.53 per cent market from 4.58 per cent while Orange gained 0.22 percentage points to record 0.82 per cent market share from 0.60 per cent
Orange currently charges Sh2 for calls within its network and Sh4 to its rivals. Both Airtel and Yu are charging Sh3 within and out of their network.
Safaricom charges sh4 within its network and Sh5 to other networks—and it revised its charges by about 25 per cent in October after it reported a 47.4 per cent drop in profits in the six months to September.
Safaricom’s market share of subscribers dropped to 66.6 per cent down from 67.7 per cent recorded during the previous period. Airtel’s stood at 15.2 per cent down from 15.7 while Orange recorded 10.3 per cent from 10.4 per cent. Essar’s increased to 7.9 per cent from 6.2 per cent.
During the quarter under review, the four mobile operators experienced gains in subscriptions with Safaricom recording the highest gains with 741,560 new subscriptions from 593,177 recorded in the previous period.
Essar Telecom (yuMobile) followed with 600,285 new subscriptions up from 46,742 recorded during the previous period.
Mobile money transfer subscriptions rose by 3.08 per cent from 18.4 million in the previous period to 18.9 million.
Meanwhile, Internet service continued to rise steadily during the quarter to stand at 6,152,687 Internet subscriptions from 5,422,009 during the previous period, representing a 13.48 per cent increase.
The estimated number of Internet users rose by 21.55 per cent from 14.30 million users in the previous period to 17.38 million during the period under review.
