New report shows that Safaricom Lipa Mdogo Mdogo have taken up to 50,000 smartphones.
Did you know you can now get a phone on a loan and pay for it as you use it? If you’re like me you may be wondering why on earth would I take a phone on a loan? well, for some people a phone is a necessity and upgrading is even more of a need. There’s clearly a high demand for this new package as Kenyans have been taking phones and paying as little as 20 shillings.
The package was introduced in July and since then more than 769 customers have been acquiring handsets daily. The telco now has plans to convert about 4 million 2G and 3G-enabled handsets to 4G in order to increase it’s data business. In the last few months Safaricom has seen a rise in profit in data but a decrease in mobile calls, so with this move they hope get better revenue.
Safaricom chief customer officer, Sylvia Mulinge said:
“We are excited about the results we are seeing. We had said we were going to use the first quarter to test customer behaviour in terms of uptake and repayment,”
She added:
“We have about 50,000 customers who have already taken it up. We want to scale up (uptake) by using our dealer network.”
Safaricom recently partnered with Google in hopes that they will be able to introduce up to 1 million affordable smartphones. A number of Kenyans still don’t own 4-G enabled phones so the goal with this project is to allow everyone to be able to make daily, weekly, partial or full payment ad sends three SMS reminders every day prompting customers to pay.
