Safaricom Limited; The Winter of their success

Safaricom Limited, the largest telecommunication within and without Kenya is strongly wading through an economic storm, beating all expectations and headed to positivity as far as the market stats are concerned.

Kenya’s main opposition, National Super Alliance (NASA) has called on its supporters to boycott the products and services offered by Safaricom Limited. The boycott was seen by most economic analysts as aimed at hurting the income of the telecommunication company. However, instead of the company suffering, despite the embargo for the NASA supporters, Safaricom seems to be sailing swiftly. We have seen its infrastructure destroyed in key parts of western, its CEO is medical leave and one of its key directors has been prosecuted by the DPP’s office. Indeed it’s a tumulus time for them. The winter of their success is the Achilles of their moment.

On Tuesday, Safaricom was both among the top gainers and top movers of the day. The company moved the market with 7.05 million shares and a market capitalization of 1.08 trillion. As a top gainer, on the same day, Safaricom Limited gained 4.85 percent and its share price hit an all-time high of 27 shillings per share.

The following images show how Safaricom’s share price has been for the last one week:

From the image above, the share price of Safaricom has been rising, reaching its all-time high of 27 shillings per share on 21^st November 2017.

According to stock analysts, the Safaricom stock has been up by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the year.

The image below shows the share price of Safaricom in seven days:

According to stats released by Cytonn Investments Limited, Safaricom Limited registered a growth in their subscriber market share to 72.6 percent as at June 2017 from 65.2 percent as at June 2016.

The total customer base for the telecommunication giant grew by 10.8 percent to 29.5 million as at September 2017 from 26.6 million as at September 2016.

In 2017, Safaricom enhanced the quality and coverage of its network currently at 96 percent population coverage with 4G at 32 percent and 3G 85 percent.

Just recently, Safaricom launched an innovation hub, accelerated the rollout of their Fibre To The Home network, upgraded the M-PESA platform and extended the M-PESA 1-tap.

M-PESA revenue rose by 16.2 percent to 30.1 billion shillings from 25.9 billion shillings during the H1’2017 supported by 12.1 percent growth in registered M-PESA customers to 27.8 million, and an increase in activity as measured by users who were active in the last 30 days by 9.5 percent to 19.3 million from 17.6 million.

The cashless platform, Lipa na M-Pesa, continues to be adopted by firms and currently has over 70,000 merchants on a 30-day active basis. Mobile data revenue grew by 31.0 percent y/y to 17.6 billion shillings from 13.4 billion shillings, driven by a 13.5 percent increase in 30-day active mobile data customers to 17.0 million from 14.9 million in H1’2017 and increased smartphone penetration. Currently, there are over 90,000 homes and 1,670 commercial buildings with FTTH network, further driving the growth in data usage.