By The COVID-19 Pandemic has a huge struggle for many companies around the world and closer to Home, Safaricom PLC has had its fair share of struggles. The company just released its audited results for the past year and it reveals all their ups and downs during this period.
Safaricom VS COVID-19: There can only be one winner
Headlining the audit, Peter Ndegwa, Safaricom PLC CEO notes that despite the slowdown in economic activity, he is proud of the actions they took.
“Our most critical support to the country was and remains, ensuring network stability to keep the country connected. We will also keep offering relevant products and support to our customers including SMEs and MSMEs.”
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A couple of choices, among others, Safaricom made include
- Supporting working and schooling from home
- Enhancing mobile money for transfers and payments to reduce cash handling and curb the spread of the virus.
- waiving fees on; Person to Person (P2P) for transactions of KES 1,000 and below. This was then reverted but with a twist. They reduced P2P transaction charges by up to 45% for low-value transaction bands below KES 7,500.
- Bank to M-PESA wallet and M-PESA wallet to bank transfers (C2B and B2C)
- Zero-rated pay bills and tills for hospitals and dispensaries as well as Lipa na M-PESA transactions below KES 1,000
- Adjusting the double bandwidth offering in support of our Home Fibre customers.
- Launching 5G trials in April 2021 for individual and enterprise customers
- Investing KES 339Mn through our Foundations in the year.
In terms of overcoming struggles for the Telco;
- Despite voice and messaging revenue recording a decline of 5.7% YoY it was not all dark. Voice outgoing minutes per subscriber grew 19.1% YoY and incoming minutes grew 16.2% YoY driven by “Tunukiwa” talk more campaign.
- M-PESA revenue declined 2.1% YoY with a decline of 14.5% YoY in 1H FY21. However, it recorded a significant recovery in 2H FY21 growing
10.1%. - Also, mobile data grew 11.5% YoY sustaining the double-digit growth trend from the prior year.
The rest of the document details the costs, performance indicators and financial information from the company. It indicates that despite the struggles Safaricom did well to try and manage the pandemic while thinking about the subscribers. They evidently win this round.
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