Safaricom Lipa Mdogo Mdogo seems to be moving on quite well as a new report shows that customers have taken up to 50,000 smartphones that require daily repayments of as little as KES 20. This has been a rising part in the telco’s quest to ramp up data revenues.

According to Safaricom, the phones were taken up between July 28th and end of September. This means that 769 customers were going for the handsets daily on average.

The network operator has revealed its plans to convert about 4 million 2G and 3G-enabled handsets to 4G in order to turn up its data business. This would help in diminishing sluggish growth in mobile calls, where revenue growth has been small. This has forced the firm to turn to M-PESA and internet as streams of powering future growth.

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“We are excited about the results we are seeing. We had said we were going to use the first quarter to test customer behaviour in terms of uptake and repayment,” said Sylvia Mulinge, Safaricom chief customer officer.

“We have about 50,000 customers who have already taken it up. We want to scale up (uptake) by using our dealer network.”

Safaricom plans to grow the service further via its new partnership with Google that will see one million affordable smartphones brought in.

Lipa Mdogo Mdogo was launched in July as a device financing service for customers who still use feature phones to have an opportunity of owning 4G-enabled phones.

The plan allows customers to make daily, weekly, partial or full payment ad sends three SMS reminders every day prompting customers to pay.

It is open to customers who have been on Safaricom network for at least one year and have not been blacklisted by any credit reference bureau (CRB).