Kenya’s third-largest telecommunications company, Telkom Kenya, shed more than one million customers in the 12 months to June this year, new disclosures showed, extending a trend observed the previous year when the company lost 899,458 customers.
Analysis of official data released by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) shows that the telco had 1.48 million customers at the end of June 2024, representing a 41.4 percent decline from the 2.5 million registered subscribers up to June 2023.
During the year under review, Telkom was one of the only two telcos to lose part of its customer base, along with Finserve, which shed 48,882 users, representing a 3.3 percent decline, to 1.45 million subscribers.
On the other hand, Jamii Tecommunication Limited (JTL) gained at the fastest pace of 43.4 percent during the period, adding 178,559 new SIM card holders to reach 590,108 customers, followed by Airtel which gained 2.2 million new users, representing a jump of 12.3 percent. To 20.3 million.
For its part, market leader Safaricom amassed a marginal 2.6% of new users, taking the total subscriber base to 45.1 million compared to 43.9 million as of June last year.
“Active SIM (mobile) subscriptions refer to SIM cards that have been used at least once within the last three months and that have generated revenue by making or receiving a call or performing non-voice activity such as sending or receiving SMS or accessing the Internet, increasing airtime, and transactions using mobile money and mobile banking),” CA wrote in its latest sector statistics report.
“Non-revenue generating activities such as balance inquiries, missed calls, password resets, among other free services, do not qualify a customer’s account as active.”
Telkom’s problems date back to the beginning of April 2022, when the industry regulator began regularly turning off SIM cards that were not registered, the latest operation that has been done repeatedly since 2013.
In the campaign, telecom companies were asked to re-register their subscribers by updating their details using a passport-sized digital photo of the customers.
The CA said at the time that illegally registered SIM cards were being used to commit crimes, including forms of money laundering, kidnapping, malicious calls, cybercrime as well as mobile money fraud.
Telkom has struggled over the years to keep up with Safaricom and Airtel in the race for the domestic market, and a continuing decline in the number of active customers is expected to lead to a significant decline in the company’s revenue from a range of services that include calls, SMS and mobile money. , among other things.
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