When Peter Ndegwa stepped into the Group CEO role at Safaricom PLC in April 2020, he did not inherit a struggling company. He inherited something far more complicated: East Africa’s most profitable corporate engine, a national utility in everything but name, and a brand whose commercial success had become deeply woven into Kenya’s social, financial and economic life.

That kind of inheritance can trap a leader. It tempts management to protect the old model, defend legacy revenues, and milk the machine until the market changes faster than the boardroom. Ndegwa’s mandate was therefore both simple and brutal: keep Safaricom’s Kenyan engine generating cash, while rewriting the company’s DNA from a voice-and-SMS telecommunications giant into a purpose-led, data-driven, regional technology platform.

Six years later, the numbers tell a story that is bigger than quarterly profit. Safaricom has crossed the KES 414.1 billion service-revenue line, delivered approximately KES 100 billion in group net income, deepened M-PESA into one of Africa’s most powerful digital-finance ecosystems, and forced its way into Ethiopia, one of the continent’s most difficult but most strategic telecoms markets. This is not merely corporate growth. It is strategic reinvention at continental scale.

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Safaricom’s resilience was tested by the worst possible operating environment

The Peter Ndegwa era has not unfolded in calm waters. Safaricom has had to fight through pandemic-era disruptions, high inflation, foreign-exchange volatility, severe depreciation of regional currencies, regulatory interventions, pressure on consumer wallets, and the heavy start-up costs of Ethiopia. Any one of those shocks could have slowed the company. Combined, they could have exposed the weaknesses of a complacent incumbent.

Instead, Safaricom’s core engine absorbed the pressure and kept compounding. Its FY26 results show group service revenue of KES 414.1 billion, while group net income reached KES 99.7 billion, commonly rounded to the historic KES 100 billion mark. The Kenyan business remained the profit anchor, but the Group’s future increasingly became regional, digital and platform-led.

The most important lesson here is not that Safaricom made money. Safaricom has always made money. The lesson is that the company made money while funding one of Africa’s most ambitious greenfield telecoms expansions, while defending its domestic market, while absorbing regulatory pressure, and while shifting its revenue mix away from yesterday’s cash cows. That is the difference between profitability and strategic resilience.

M-PESA is no longer a product. It is Safaricom’s economic operating system

The most decisive transformation under Ndegwa has been the maturation of M-PESA. What began historically as a peer-to-peer money-transfer service has become a multi-sided digital financial platform touching consumers, merchants, banks, developers, micro-enterprises, corporates and governments. It is now less accurate to call M-PESA a product. It is Safaricom’s economic operating system.

In FY26, M-PESA revenue grew to KES 182.7 billion and accounted for 45.6% of Safaricom Kenya’s service revenue. Its scale is almost difficult to comprehend: tens of billions of transactions, trillions of shillings in value processed, and a daily role in how ordinary Kenyans pay, borrow, save, sell, receive, survive and grow.

This matters because the future of telecommunications is not voice. It is not even data alone. It is the ability to sit at the centre of daily digital behaviour. M-PESA gives Safaricom that centre. Every merchant payment, Fuliza interaction, bank-to-wallet transfer, Pochi transaction, bill payment and app-based service deepens the platform’s intelligence and commercial gravity.

The MSME economy became Safaricom’s second frontier

Safaricom’s strongest strategic move has been to understand that the next layer of growth sits inside Kenya’s informal and semi-formal enterprise economy. The mama mboga, kiosk owner, boda-boda operator, salonist, fundi, small wholesaler, online seller and micro-merchant are not peripheral users of technology. They are the economy’s operating layer.

Through Lipa na M-PESA, Pochi la Biashara and the Consumer and Business Super Apps, Safaricom has pushed deeper into the daily life of small businesses. The active merchant base has grown to about 3.1 million businesses, turning M-PESA from a consumer convenience into an MSME digitisation rail.

This is why the company’s decision to reduce Fuliza daily maintenance fees by 50% and lower transaction friction was not just public relations. It was defensive economics and social strategy combined. In an inflationary economy, protecting transaction velocity protects the ecosystem. If small businesses stop moving money, everyone loses: merchants, customers, lenders, suppliers, government and Safaricom itself.

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If M-PESA is the heart of Safaricom’s platform