Last year, mobile phone companies slashed SMS prices to historical lows of about Sh1. Photo/FILE
By MUTHOKI MUMO mumumo@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Friday, January 6 2012 at 18:49
Posted Friday, January 6 2012 at 18:49
Hard economic times has seen Kenyans turn to sending messages with the number of short messages sent between July and September hit 1.5 billion messages.
In its quarterly report, the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) says the number of SMS sent went up by 135.2 per cent from the 641 million sent between April to June.
“People changed consumption habits. They chose to send an SMS and save a shilling that they could divert to other uses,” PS ministry of Information, Dr Bitange Ndemo.
Inflation accelerated in April 2011 to a double digit figure of 12.05 per cent to hit 17.32 per cent in September 2011, pushing basic commodities out of reach to many Kenyans.
Service providers took advantage of this to launch aggressive promotions and affordable bundle offerings.
Unlimited promotions
“SMS prices have come down significantly. There are also a lot of unlimited promotions being offered across the industry,” added Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore.
Early last year, mobile phone companies slashed SMS prices to historical lows of about Sh1 and have since then remained relatively untouched.
“67.2 per cent of Kenyans now have mobile phones. This is the cheapest way to reach them. You don’t need to build expensive customer care centres with SMS,” said technology consultant, Mr Vincent Mutavi.
Mr Mutavi also cited a proliferation of gaming and betting campaigns that require players to send messages to mobile short codes in order to participate.
In comparison, voice traffic inched up by a marginal 13.6 per cent attributed to increased mobile subscription and network coverage expansion.
Safaricom dominated the voice traffic with a market share of 88.27 per cent during the period under review despite losing 0.9 percentage points in subscription market share to 67.7 per cent.
Bharti Airtel was the only firm that gained subscription market share from 14.3 per cent in the last quarter 2010/2011 to 15.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2011/2012.
Yumobile lost subscriber base by 0.1 points while Telkom Orange lost 0.4 points. Internet penetration hit a third of the Kenyan population at 14.3 million with 99 per cent of these accessing from mobile phones.
Within a period of three months, Kenyans deposited Sh56.7 billion through mobile money, a 17.5 increase from the previous quarter.
According to CCK, the trend is expected to continue while Safaricom projects that second quarter figures will be much higher than this given the holiday activity that has already been recorded.
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