Sourced from CGTN. The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) recently released its Economic Survey 2020 report, giving new insights into the country’s economy.
Kenya’s ICT sector remains an important piece of the economy, and within this sector rests Kenya’s telecom industry, and the industry is booming. According to a survey by the KNBS for March 2020 , the average Kenyan spends most of their income on airtime.
Kenyans use ICT for their calls, to send texts, send virtual currency and they use data daily – the average Safaricom customer uses up to 1GB of data per month . Kenyans spend a lot of their money on telecoms, and it shows in the statistics.
According to the report, telecommunication operators in Kenya made $2.7-billion (KES 291-billion) in 2019, which is up 7.5% from 2018’s statistic. Safaricom itself made the lion’s share of the industry at $2.3-billion (KES 251-billion) in 2019. According to Tech Weez , this means that Safaricom made 86% of all revenue in the industry last year.
The other telecoms made a total of roughly 14% of last year’s revenue. This 14% equates to about $371-million (KES 39.9-billion). In comparison, Safaricom made $335-million (KES 36-billion) from mobile data alone in 2019.
KNBS’ data reach back to 2015 and Safaricom’s contributions to the total remain consistent at 86% if compared side-by-side with the company’s financial results . In 2018, it made KES 234-billion – 86.58% of the industry’s total. It made 84% of the total in 2016 and 87% of the total in 2017.
Tech Weez writes that this information is quite startling. It was already believed that Safaricom would be the industry leader in the country, but the difference is cavernous. The company is single-handedly holding up Kenya’s telecom industry, which may be a negative influence in the long-run of the country’s telecommunication’s history.
Safaricom’s revenues are generated mostly from voice revenue, mobile data and MPESA which enjoy growth year on year.
Edited by Luis Monzon
Follow Luis Monzon on Twitter
