Safaricom Ethiopian subsidiary on Wednesday reported that it had reached a total of five million subscribers in just less than a year, the telco’s chief corporate affairs officer Stephen Kiptinness confirmed.
According to the Kenyan telecom giant, it targets to raise the number to 10million subscribers by March next year in the Ethiopian market.
On October 6 2022,Safaricom entered the Ethiopian Market acquiring 740,000 subscribers by the close of the first month while generating Sh98.3 million in revenue from the market during the period.
Safaricom later in mid-November reported it had crossed the one million mark in customer base.
By mid-March this year, the subsidiary had amassed 2.8 million customers, meaning it has added 2.2 million users in five months to reach the current number, translating to an average of 14,600 sign-ups daily which speaks of a decline in the onboarding pace from the average of 18,000 daily sign-ups witnessed in the period between end of October and mid-November.
Safaricom, which is the major shareholder in the Ethiopian consortium which includes UK’s Vodafone, South Africa’s Vodacom, Sumitomo Corporation and British International Investment, is battling with the country’s State-owned Ethio Telecom (Ethiotel) to control the expansive market of 112 million people.
In its annual report for the full year ending June 2023, Ethiotel announced that its total subscribers had reached 72 million, which marked an eight percent increase from the number reported in the previous year.
Ethiotel’s customer numbers translate to the biggest single-country subscriber base of any nation on the continent.
