It seems that the past week has been very interesting for Zain Kenya on so many fronts. The first major development is that Zain head office in Kuwait has sold off 46% of the business to a consortium of Indian and Malaysian Investors for US$ 13.7 Billion. The big news here is that the new investors have already stated that they intend to retain Zain’s Africa operations, which obviously affects the Kenya business.

The second major development at Zain Kenya this past week is that they announced that they had (finally) connected to the SEACOM high speed undersea cable. The obvious goal of this move is to start getting more and more of their subscribers using their data services which is the next frontier for revenue growth in Kenya’s telecommunications sector. This comes somewhat late since competitors like Safaricom have been on SEACOM for over a month now. Safaricom also have the upper hand (still) since Zain Kenya is still work with the slower 2.5G EDGE and GPRS technologies whilst Safaricom has 3G which is significantly faster.

The last major development at Zain Kenya this week is that they have launched unlimited internet packages for their prepaid customers. The packages enable subscribers to have unlimited internet access for either a daily rate of Kes. 250.00 or pay Kes. 3,250.00 for a 30 day package. This is an obvious move to counter the massive mobile data campaign that Safaricom has been waging in the marketplace, which, whilst offering fast speeds has an expensive per megabyte billing model.