Business
Kenya: Mobile money deposits hit $8 billion in 2012 – new taxes on transactions coming
Mobile phone subscriptions in the period under review rose 17.5 percent to 29.43 million, meaning penetration in the country is now at 75.4 percent.
Safaricom maintained the lead in the industry, with a 64 percent subscription market share, a four percentage point drop from last year.
Telkom Orange lost 0.3 percentage points in market share while the other two operators, Airtel and YuMobile, both gained market share.
“We attribute this strong growth to increased investments in our people, product innovation and improvement in quality of service has been the key driver in making us the network of choice by more customers in Kenya during the last quarter,” a statement from Airtel said.
Despite the increase in the number of mobile subscriptions, Kenyans are talking less. The minutes of use per subscriber per month fell by 20.3 percent from the similar period of last year.
Meanwhile, the year was tough for companies in the fixed data market as revenues fell drastically. The Communications Commission of Kenya claims that revenue in the data market, excluding the mobile sector, fell 88.7 percent in 2011.
Source: Africa Review
