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Safaricom Maintains Lead On New Mobile Phone Lines(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) MOBILE companies registered 1.98 million more subscribers between March last year and this year, according to data released yesterday by Communications Authority of Kenya. Subscriptions to the mobile phone stood at 31.83 million during the quarter period ending March - 520,986 more than the previous quarter to December 2013- CA said in the quarterly report. Safaricom had 21,567,388 accounts followed by Airtel Kenya with 5,251,087, third was Essar Telecom 's yuMobile with 2,557,630 while Telkom Kenya's Orange remained bottom with 2,453,898 subscribers. Penetration rate of mobile services rose to 78.2 per cent during the quarter under review from 76.9 per cent previously. Safaricom's dominance in market share was however clipped by a marginal 0.1 per cent in the review period compared to the previous quarter ending December to stand at 67.8 per cent. It was followed by Airtel with 16.5 per cent market share which was unchanged quarter on quarter while Yu mobile controlled eight per cent even after losing 0.5 per cent stake. Orange remained rooted at the bottom with a share of 7.7 per cent despite a 0.5 gain in the quarter to March over the previous one. Between January and March this year, the industry posted a total of 7.6 billion talk time minutes , a drop of 1.2 per cent compared with a similar period last year and 2.7 per cent less than the preceding quarter. Call to the same network declined by 2.6 per cent to 6.6 billion minutes while cross-network calls went down by 3.2 per cent to 971million minutes. "This decline could be attributed to the reduced effect of the festive season which ended early January," CA said in the report. Safaricom experienced a slight drop in calls on its network in the review quarter to six billion minutes from 6.1 billion minutes but its share nonetheless increased 0.3 percentage points to 78.5 per cent over the previous quarter and 2 percentage points better than in a similar period in 2013. Airtel's traffic dropped to 835 million minutes from 892 million while YU posted a 0.3 per cent dip to 583 million minutes. Orange was the sole gainer quarter on quarter, recording 234 million minutes from 208 million minutes. The number of text messages sent during the period also declined, closing the three-month period to March at 6.22 billion SMS down from 6.28 billion in the October-December period. This translated to 65 SMS per subscriber. Safaricom controlled a massive 96.4 per cent share of the industry SMS traffic, followed by Airtel which dropped to 2.7 per cent market share from 3.2 per cent. Yu lost 0.2 percentage points to 0.4 claim 0.4 per cent share of the industry SMS volumes, tying with Orange. Internet penetration rose by 200,000 accounts to 13.3 million subscriptions from 13.1 million powered largely by growth in mobile based data as a "resuult of increased operators focus on growing revenue from the data market", CA said. "In addition, consistent promotions and special offers have attracted subscribers of mobile services to acquire data bundle offers and other incentives to drive the use of data/internet services ," the regulator added. Copyright The Star. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |