Reports reaching Taarifa Business Desk indicate that just one month after establishing operations in Ethiopia, Kenya’s ambitious telecom company Safaricom has crossed the 1 million mark in subscriber numbers.
The revelation was made via a live broadcast screen count that was shared across social media platforms on Wednesday.
Just last week while announcing its half-year financial results, the company said it had acquired 740,000 subscribers by the end of October, generating Sh98.3 million in revenue from the market in the first month of operations.
This means that the telco has gained a subscriber base of 260,000 users in two weeks translating to an average of 18,000 sign-ups daily.
The Kenyan firm is battling with Ethiopia’s State monopoly Ethio Telecom to control the country’s expansive market of 110 million mobile users.
In September, the government of Ethiopia decided to amends laws to allow foreign investments in the country especially in domains of banking,transportation,telecommunication and aviation.
“Opening up to foreign investors would transform our country’s economy by boosting it to have a better link with the international market,” the Prime Ministers office said in a statement.
The government said it seeks to encourage competition, enhance foreign currency inflows and also generate more jobs.
In 2021, the Ethiopian Government permitted a private telecom operator to compete with the state-owned Ethio Telecom.
Kenya’s Safaricom along with South Africa’s Vodacom, UK’s Vodafone and Japan-based Sumitomo, paid $850m for the licence.
In September 2021, Ethiopia’s Bank of Abyssinia (BoA) collaborated with Xpert Digital to implement Temenos Infinity to digitise its banking services and accelerate customer growth.
Through the digital banking platform, BoA planned to revamp its retail mobile banking and SME digital banking services, to enable a unified, omnichannel experience.
