Airtel Networks Kenya, which is eyeing a bigger stake in Kenya’s telecoms industry, has accused the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) of allegedly ignoring market dominance by rival Safaricom #ticker:SCOM.
The telco, in a petition to Parliament, also blamed the telecoms regulator for skewed allocation of mobile spectrum in favour of Safaricom and failure to reduce the fees that mobile phone operators charge each other for interconnecting calls.
“There has been no dispute as to the status of Safaricom as regards its dominance status and significant market power. However, there has been reluctance in declaring Safaricom dominant in the retail mobile market and the retail mobile money market,” Airtel said in a memorandum to the ICT committee of the Senate.
Industry data from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) – the telecoms regulator — shows that Safaricom held 64 per cent of the local market, more than double Airtel’s 27 per cent share, as at the year ended June. Telkom Kenya holds seven percent of the market.
Airtel has cited eight African nations where operators had been declared market-dominant with even lower thresholds than Safaricom’s.
These include Burkina Faso that declared Airtel and Telmob dominant with shares of 39.24 percent and 38.36 percent respectively of the market. Congo Brazzaville declared MTN and Airtel dominant with 40 percent and 38 percent shares of the market while in Nigeria, MTN was declared dominant with a market share of 44 percent.
“Declaring Safaricom dominant is the first step to ensuring market competitiveness which we believe has been the sticking point and key barrier in taking any steps to rectify any market anomalies in Kenya,” Airtel said in its submissions to the Senate.
“A notion has been perpetuated that declaring Safaricom a dominant player is punishing success, which in our view is blatantly myopic.”
Airtel also told the Senate committee that there was bias in the allocation of spectrum, with Safaricom holdings much more than its rivals.
“Despite investing heavily in the network to improve customer experience, we continue to grapple with lack of spectrum especially in 4G/LTE which as advised by the CA is unavailable, yet the dominant player holds excessive spectrum,” Airtel said.
Airtel’s petition to Parliament shows that it has been allocated 50 MHz of the spectrum compared to 82.5 MHz for Safaricom and 37.5 MHz for Telkom Kenya.The telco said CA’s failure to review the fees that mobile phone operators charge each other for interconnecting calls since 2015 has […]