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The Most Important Metrics From Kenya’s Communications Authority Fourth Quarter Sector Statistics Report

Earlier today Kenya’s Communications Authority (CA) released its Fourth Quarter Sector Statistics Report that covers the period April 2015 to June 2015. This is a generally data-rich and comprehensive document (as always) with lots of interesting insights. However, from my perspective as an aspiring data maven here are the most important metrics from the same:

  • Kenya as of June 2015 had 36.1 million mobile subscriptions which translates into a penetration of 83.9%
  • Mobile money subscriptions in Kenya stood at 27.7 million or 65% penetration for the quarter. 
  • Mobile voice traffic volume grew to an unprecedented 9.2 billion minutes
  • SMS traffic grew to 6.57 billion messages for the quarter and 27.4 billion for the year to date, reversing the decline previously seen due to Over The Top (OTT) mobile services like WhatsApp (this can be attributed to significantly less expensive SMS rates via low cost bundle offers from Kenya’s mobile networks in recent months)
  • Orange Kenya’s fixed lines dropped massively by 56.3% to 87,774, down from 202,961 lines when they turned off their CDMA network and moved subscribers to their GSM network.
  • Total local fixed line voice traffic dropped a further 16.1% to 18.7 million minutes, implying that fixed lines are essentially going the way of the dinosaur.
  • Total Internet subscriptions grew by 5.9% to 19.9 million subscribers and at the same time estimated Internet users in Kenya stood at 29.6 million users for the quarter. This means that 73% of Kenya is now online which is massive! In addition, mobile Internet subscriptions (still) contribute 99% of the total Internet subscriptions in Kenya at 19.8 million subscriptions
  • Terrestrial wireless Internet subscriptions increased to 17,721 subscriptions whilst fixed ADSL Internet subscriptions declined by a massive 82.3% to 2,597 from 14,685 subscriptions due to the uptake of the fibre network at the expense of the now defunct ADSL (Copper) network. Fibre Internet subscriptions correspondingly grew to 93,598 for the quarter.
  • Internet bandwidth to Kenya essentially doubled by an impressive 96.9% to 1,668,546 Mbps over the year implying that broadband uptake is driving this growth at an exponential rate.
  • In terms of mobile network market share, Safaricom was the largest by far at 67% or 24.1 million subscriptions, Airtel is second at 19.4% or 7 million subscriptions, Orange Kenya is third at 11.2% or 4 million subscriptions, and MVNO Equitel is a fast growing fourth at 2.4% or 873,643 subscriptions.
  • In terms of mobile Internet subscriptions, Safaricom is the largest with 63% or 12.6 million subscriptions, Airtel is second with 19% or 3.7 million subscriptions, Orange Kenya is third with 14% or 2.7 million subscriptions, Equitel is fourth with 4% or 874,000 subscriptions.
  • In terms of fixed or wireless Internet subscriptions, Wananchi Group (Zuku) is the largest with 53.6% market share or 63,542 subscriptions. Second largest is Liquid Telecom with an impressive 16.5% or 19,535 subscriptions. Third largest is Safaricom with 9.2% or 10,965 subscriptions and Access Kenya is fourth largest with 7.1% or 8,441 subscriptions. Fifth largest is Jamii Telecom (Faiba) with a surprisingly modest 6.6% or 7,486 subscriptions and sixth largest is iWay Africa with 2.8% or 3,271 subscriptions. Seventh largest is Orange Kenya with only 1.8% or 2,152 subscriptions whilst MTN Kenya is eighth largest with an even lower 0.7% or 879 subscriptions. Internet Solution is ninth largest with 0.6% or 742 subscriptions whereas CallKey Networks has 0.5% or 638 subscriptions.
  • Broadband Internet subscriptions grew 6.1% for the quarter to 5.32 million subscriptions and were still 99% of ALL broadband Internet subscriptions in Kenya.  
  • In the year 2014, annual Internet revenue stood at Kes. 10.1 billion whilst investments were at Kes. 3.4 billion.

So. There you have it. You can download the full report from the CA website here

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