Kenya now boasts of more than 31.8 million mobile subscriptions up from 31.3 million recorded during the last quarter, according to recent ICT Sector Quarterly Statistics Report for Q3 Financial Year 2013/14. This increase represents a 1.7 per cent growth during the period.
From the 31.8 million, 31.2 milion are prepaid subscriptions while 607,569 are post paid subscriptions.
The prepaid subscriptions increased by 1.5 per cent from 30.7 million during the previous quarter while the post-paid grew by 8.4 per cent from 560,503 subscriptions compared to the previous quarter. This puts Kenya’s mobile penetration to 78.2 per cent after a 1.3 percentage growth.
According to the report, Safaricom, Airtel and Orange Kenya were the biggest gainers while Essar Telkom the loser.Safaricom and Airtel gained 1.5 and 1.8 per cent subscriptions respectively while Telkom Kenya had the highest gain in subscriptions of 8.8 per cent compared to Essar Telecom’s 3.5 per cent loss of its subscriptions.
Safaricom Limited had 21,567,388 from 21,248,287, Airtel Networks Limited had 5,251,087 from 5,156,269, Essar Telecom Limited had 2,557,630 from 2,649,362 and Orange or Telkom Kenya had 2,453,898 from 2,255,099 totalling to 31,830,003 in March 2014 from 31,309,01 in December 2013.
On market share by subscription, Orange or Telkom Kenya saw an increase in shares of 0.5 percentage points to 7.7 per cent up from 7.2 per cent shares while Safaricom Limited and Essar Telecom limited lost 0.1 per cent and 0.5 per cent of market shares to reach 67.8 per cent and 8.0 per cent shares respectively. Airtel Networks Limited shares remained unchanged at 16.5 per cent compared to the previous quarter.
Other key highlights unclude:
Mobile money transfer grew by 0.9 per cent to record 26.2 million subscriptions from 26.0 million in the previous quarter while money transfer agents grew by 10.6 per cent to stand at 103,660 agents. MNP increased by 31.2 per cent to stand at 362 in-ports up from 276 in-ports recorded in the previous quarter.
On a downward trend was voice traffic and SMS.Local mobile voice traffic dropped by 2.7 per cent to post 7.6 billion minutes down from 7.8 billion minutes while the subscriber average minutes of use stood at 80.3 minutes per month compared to 84.1 minutes registered in the last quarter.
Due to smartphone penetration and increasing use of OTT, SMS traffic declined by 1.0 per cent to reach 6.22 billion down from 6.28 billion messages sent during the preceding quarter with each subscriber sending an average of 65.1 messages per month.
Internet penetration stood 53.3 per cent up from 52.3 per cent during the preceding quarter. The number of broadband subscriptions increased marginally by 0.9 per cent to reach 1.44 million subscriptions from 1.43 million subscriptions recorded during the previous quarter while the number of domain names grew by 9.1 per cent to 33,381 up from 30,585 in the previous quarter.
Kenyans also send just 16.8 million letters, a 2.8 per cent decline from 17.3 million letters sent out during the previous quarter.
