In the Kenyan mobile money market, Safaricom’s M-Pesa is the dominant player controlling a huge stake of the market. Its competitors, Airtel and Telkom have their respective services but none of them has come close to M-Pesa. I am not even sure Telkom’s offering is still available, I haven’t heard about anyone using it ever since it went live.
Airtel Money seems to be losing its grip, if it even had one to being with, as it has reportedly lost over 3.74 million customers in one year. This represents about 91.9% of its customers lost in the last 12 months.
From the latest stats released by the Communication Authority of Kenya (CA), by the end of March this year, Airtel Money had only 329,660 customers. This is about double the number of all Safaricom M-Pesa agents in the country. During the same period 12 months back, the Airtel Money had about 4,075 million customers.
M-Pesa’s Market Share Grows to 98.8%
With Airtel Money losing customers, M-Pesa has benefited a lot and now has a market share of 98.8% up from 81.3% the previous year. M-Pesa currently has 28.84 million users which is up 10.6 million users from the same period the year before.
“M-Pesa retained the highest market share of 98.8 per cent, whereas Airtel Money and T-Kash recorded market shares of 1.1 and 0.05 per cent respectively,” the CA stated.
M-Pesa has a far superior product compared to the other mobile money services with a huge network of agents across the country. Safaricom has also worked hard to integrate M-Pesa with businesses to enable customers buy good and pay their bills through the service. With the advantages Safaricom had as being the first product on the market, the other players will always have a hard time competing with M-Pesa.
Also Read: CBK Rejects Safaricom’s Bid to cap free M-Pesa transactions to Only Five