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In less than six months since its entry into Ethiopia, Safaricom has grown its customer base to 2.8 million users, as revealed by the telco’s public relations manager, Christopher Karanja, during an interview with Business Daily on Thursday. Having launched operations on October 6 last year, Safaricom had acquired 740,000 subscribers and generated KES 98.3 million in revenue within its first month.
By mid-November, the Kenyan firm had crossed the one million customer mark, adding 1.8 million users in the following four months. This translates to an average of 15,000 daily sign-ups, a slight decline from the 18,000 daily sign-ups seen between the end of October and mid-November.
Safaricom, the major shareholder in the Ethiopian consortium – which also includes Vodafone, Vodacom, Sumitomo Corporation, and British International Investment – is competing with state-owned Ethio Telecom for control of the vast market of 112 million people. As of 2021, Ethio Telecom boasted 58.7 million subscribers, making it the largest single-country subscriber base for any operator in Africa.
To scale up its customer base to a profitable level, Safaricom is focusing on providing quality telecommunications services and aggressively marketing its brand in a market that has only had one provider for decades. The company’s success in overtaking Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya in the local market can be attributed to sustained investment in infrastructure and innovations like M-Pesa.
