Earlier today the Communications Authority of Kenya released their latest sector statistics for the first quarter covering the period July to September 2015. As always, the report offers some interesting insights on mobile and internet trends in Kenya which I always feel compelled to share on my blog in a succinct form. Therefore, without further ado, this is what caught my eye:

Mobile Metrics

• Mobile subscriptions grew to 37.8 million during the quarter in Kenya after growing by an impressive 1.7 million subscriptions in the last quarter.
• Mobile penetration grew to an impressive 88.1% which is just a shade under 90% meaning that all of Kenya will soon be on mobile devices. Food for thought in terms of where media consumption will obviously be going. Disruptive times ahead!
• Safaricom’s marketshare stood at 66.3% with 25.1 million mobile subscriptions. Dominant? Thats pretty obvious at this point
• Airtel marketshare is grew to 19.1% with 7.2 million mobile subscriptions
• Equitel’s marketshare grew to 2.9% with 1.08 million mobile subscriptions
• Orange marketshare grew to 11.8% with 4.4 million subscriptions. Even though they are up for sale Orange is still very much alive, and kicking and even growing
• Each mobile subscriber in Kenya spoke an average of 84.9 minutes per month during the quarter
• SMS traffic surprisingly grew to 7 billion messages owing to the heavily reduced costs across mobile networks to fight off instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger

Internet Metrics

• Internet subscriptions in Kenya hit 21.6 million meaning a penetration of 74.2% was achieved during the same period. Its fairly obvious that Internet growth in Kenya is very clearly linked to mobile penetration as the two are exploding in tandem.
• Safaricom had 64.1% mobile Internet marketshare as a result of having 13.8 million subscribers. That looks and sounds pretty dominant to me…
• Airtel had 17.5% mobile Internet marketshare with 3.7 million subscriptions
• Orange had 13.4% mobile Internet marketshare with 2.8 million subscriptions
• Equitel had 5% mobile Internet marketshare with 1 million subscriptions
• Broadband Internet subscriptions which are still 99% mobile were 6.3 million for a penetration of 14.7% which is obviously being driven by inexpensive smartphones and other mobile devices.

You can download the full report here