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Safaricom's data revenue boosts full year results

Kenya , 07 May 2015

Safaricom's data revenue boosts full year results

Safaricom released its full year financial results ending 31st March 2015, which showed that its data revenue grew by 59% to record 14.8 billion Kenyan shillings.

The company said that it will be pushing its long term evolution (LTE) service, which is currently available in Nairobi and Mombasa and planned to be in 13 other towns by December 2015.

Active monthly mobile data customers rose to 21% to register 11.6 million, which is 50% of Safaricom’s customer base.

The new television service, The Box will also be part of the data growth as they will offer subscribers 3G and 4G internet speeds in their homes.

“Today we are announcing the launch of Safaricom’s home broadband solution, which is a set top box that bring 3G and 4G network into the home,” Bob Collymore, the CEO of Safaricom said.

“As an added bonus the set top box brings Kenyan digital free to air TV channels to the customer. We will offer a wide range of relevant content and video on demand in the coming year,” he added.

All of Safaricom’s services registered growth over the last financial year. The total revenue for the company rose 13% to 169 billion Kenyan shillings, while profit after tax increased to 38% at 31.9 billion Kenyan shillings.

Voice services still accounts for 54% of Safaricom’s revenue stream and registered 4% growth and brought in 87 billion Kenyan shillings. SMS revenue grew by 15% to record 15.6 billion Kenyan shillings.

The M-Pesa revenue grew to 23% to reach 32.6 billion Kenyan shillings.

The company reported that they have been driving the adoption of Lipa na MPesa, a payment method for goods and services through mobile money, and have been able to convert only 5% of cash transactions into mobile money.

“M-Pesa is at the forefront in deepening financial inclusion in Kenya over the last year. In the past year, we have been commercialising the revolutionary Lipa na Mpesa a service that enables our customers to use their M-Pesa accounts as method of payment when retail shopping,” Collymore said.

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