<p>For nearly two decades, the Kenyan telecommunications landscape has been defined by a single entity: Safaricom. Since its early dominance, the Green Giant has not just led the market, it has defined it. From the pioneering days of M-Pesa to the 5G rollout, Safaricom has been the benchmark against which all others were measured.</p><p>But the Communications Authority of Kenya's Q2 2025/26 Sector Statistics Report, covering October to December 2025 and released earlier this month, tells a story that Safaricom's shareholders should be reading carefully. Not because Airtel is winning on subscriber numbers, it is not, at least not dramatically. But because Airtel is winning in the one place that actually funds Safaricom's entire operation.</p><h2>The Number That Actually Matters</h2><p>Mobile money contributes 41% of Safaricom's total revenue, Ksh 161 billion out of Ksh 388 billion in the last full financial year. M-Pesa is not just a product. It is the engine.</p><p>Two years ago, Airtel Money held 5.5% of Kenya's mobile money market. By Q1 2025/26 that had risen to 10.3%. The latest Q2 report confirms it has now crossed 11%. M-Pesa's share, which once sat at 98%, now stands at 89%.</p><ad-spot></ad-spot><p>That is a 9 percentage point erosion in two years in the segment that funds almost half of Safaricom's revenue. The pace is not explosive, but it is consistent, and consistency in market share erosion is more dangerous to a dominant player than a single dramatic shock.</p><h2>The Subscription Picture Is More Complicated</h2><p>Your WhatsApp groups have probably been circulating claims about Airtel's dramatic subscriber growth. The actual CA data is more nuanced.</p><p>As of December 2025, total mobile subscriptions across all operators stood at 78.4 million, growing by just 0.1% in the quarter, a sign of a maturing market that is approaching saturation at 149.5% penetration. Safaricom holds 52.4 million of those subscriptions, roughly 66.8% of the market. Airtel holds 22.9 million, or approximately 29.2%.</p><p>Airtel's subscription share is not surging, it actually edged slightly lower between Q1 and Q2 as the overall market growth slowed. The subscriber story is not where the competition is being decided. The mobile money story is.</p><p>What the subscription data does reveal, however, is something more behavioural and arguably more interesting than raw market share.</p><h2>The Active SIM Insight: Airtel Users Actually Use Their Phones</h2><p>Buried in the CA report is a data point that deserves more attention than it has received. Airtel users average <strong>2.7 minutes per call</strong>. Safaricom users average <strong>1.6 minutes</strong>.</p><p>Think about what that means. Most Kenyans carry two SIMs, a Safaricom SIM for M-Pesa access and network coverage, and an Airtel SIM for cheaper calls and data. The Safaricom SIM is the wallet. The Airtel SIM is the phone.</p><p>When someone calls from Airtel, they stay on the line longer because the call is affordable enough to have a full conversation. Safaricom calls are shorter because users are watching the bill tick. This call duration gap is one of the clearest signals of where pricing pressure actually lands on ordinary Kenyans.</p><ad-spot></ad-spot><p>Airtel Kenya also recorded 11.83 billion minutes of voice traffic in Q2, up 2.4% from Q1. More tellingly, off-net traffic( calls crossing from Airtel to Safaricom and other networks) grew 8.4% in the same period. People are calling across networks more than before, which means interoperability is working, and Airtel's affordability advantage is compelling users to use it as their primary communication tool even when calling someone on a different network.</p><h2>The Pricing War: Where Two Shillings Becomes Ksh 3,000</h2><p>At TechInKenya we often focus on technical specifications, but for the average Kenyan consumer the most important feature of any network is the cost of a minute or a megabyte. Airtel has played the long game on affordability and the mobile money data confirms it is paying off.</p><p>Sending Ksh 1,000 to another network on Airtel Money costs Ksh 11. On M-Pesa the same transaction costs Ksh 13. A two-shilling difference sounds negligible. For a micro-entrepreneur in Kajiado making 50 transactions a day, that is Ksh 100 daily, Ksh 3,000 every month in savings, or Ksh 36,000 per year. At that scale, the "cheaper" network stops being a secondary SIM and starts becoming a business decision.</p><p>This aggregation of marginal gains is precisely how Airtel is converting M-Pesa's casual users into Airtel Money's committed ones.</p><h2>The Interoperability Trojan Horse</h2><p>For years M-Pesa's dominance rested on a network effect that felt unbreakable. Everyone had M-Pesa, so you needed M-Pesa to send money to anyone. Switching to Airtel Money meant your recipients might not be able to receive it. The ecosystem locked you in more effectively than any contract.</p><p>The CA's push for full interoperability dismantled that lock-in quietly but completely. Now a user can keep their balance in an Airtel Money wallet, pay lower transaction fees, and still pay at a Safaricom Buy Goods till or any Paybill number. The friction of being on a different network has effectively been removed.</p><ad-spot></ad-spot><p>This is why Airtel Money's growth from 5.5% to 11% in two years tracks almost perfectly with the interoperability timeline. The regulatory change was the door. Lower fees were the reason to walk through it.</p><h2>What Safaricom Is Doing About It</h2><p>Safaricom is not standing still. The launch of My OneApp this month ( merging the M-Pesa and MySafaricom apps into a single AI-powered platform ) is partly a response to the UX pressure from competitors. The new app's infrastructure reportedly handles up to 6,000 transactions per second, up from roughly 100 previously. The AI personalisation layer, which learns user behaviour and surfaces relevant services proactively, is a genuine attempt to deepen the ecosystem moat rather than just defend the pricing one.</p><p>But My OneApp has generated its own friction. Users abroad have reported significant issues with the app's device-binding and OTP requirements that do not work well with international SIM swaps or roaming. For diaspora Kenyans ( a segment that sends significant remittance volumes through M-Pesa )being locked out of your account when you need it most is not a loyalty-building experience. Airtel's lighter, more utility-focused app has quietly absorbed some of that frustration.</p><p>Safaricom also holds structural advantages that Airtel cannot easily replicate. Its IoT segment leads the market with 1.8 million active connected devices ( smart meters, fleet management, industrial monitoring ) a B2B revenue stream Airtel has not meaningfully entered. Safaricom Home Fibre remains dominant in suburban fixed broadband, where the physical fibre infrastructure provides stability that 5G routers cannot yet match for high-bandwidth households.</p><p>The Ethiopia expansion is the strategic wildcard. The Safaricom Ethiopia rollout has consumed billions of shillings in capital expenditure over the past three years, which some analysts argue has constrained Safaricom Kenya's ability to respond more aggressively to domestic pricing pressure. If Ethiopia reaches profitability on its current trajectory, that capital will have been well spent and Safaricom will have built a second large market. If it does not, the domestic opportunity cost becomes harder to justify.</p><h2>The Broadband Front: A Third Competitor</h2><p>One finding in the CA data that neither Safaricom nor Airtel should ignore: Starlink has reached 0.9% of Kenya's fixed broadband market. That sounds small, but Ahadi Wireless is at 9% and Vilcom Network at 5.4% and both grew this quarter. Safaricom's fixed broadband share declined to 34.9% from 35.6%.</p><ad-spot></ad-spot><p>The fixed internet market is fragmenting. For the urban professional household that uses Home Fibre primarily for streaming, gaming, and working from home, the question of whether Safaricom's fibre or a Starlink dish is the better option is a real one in 2026. This is a slow-moving threat but it is worth watching.</p><h2>What Happens Next</h2><p>Airtel's path to further mobile money growth runs through the same mechanism that got it to 11% that is pricing, interoperability, and consistent execution. Hitting 15% mobile money share within two years is plausible if the current trajectory holds. Whether it can get to 20% or beyond depends on whether Safaricom makes a structural pricing response rather than an ecosystem one.</p><p>Safaricom's most likely responses:</p><p><strong>Loyalty depth over loyalty breadth.</strong> Bonga Points have always been a thin loyalty mechanism. Deeper integrations (cashback within M-Pesa transactions, bundled data with financial products, preferential rates for high-volume users ) would raise the switching cost without requiring across-the-board fee cuts.</p><p><strong>Enterprise and IoT as the moat.</strong> The B2B segment ( IoT connections, enterprise data, government contracts, API access through Daraja) is where Safaricom's margins are most defensible and where Airtel has the least competitive presence. Expect continued investment here.</p><p><strong>Ethiopia as the long-term bet.</strong> If the Ethiopia venture starts generating positive returns in the next 18 to 24 months, Safaricom's growth story changes significantly. It stops being a single-market company competing on price and becomes a regional technology platform with a very different investment case.</p><h2>The TechInKenya Take</h2><p>The current competitive dynamics are healthy for Kenyan consumers. Safaricom at 98% mobile money market share two years ago was not a situation that produced competitive pricing or incentivised product innovation. Airtel at 11% and rising is not yet a genuine threat to Safaricom's position, but it is enough of a threat to change behaviour.</p><p>The two-shilling fee difference is already saving the micro-entrepreneur in Kajiado Ksh 36,000 a year. That is real money doing real work. That is what competition is supposed to deliver.</p><p>The Green Giant is not going anywhere. But for the first time in the history of Kenya's mobile money market, M-Pesa's dominance is something that is being competed away — slowly, consistently, and in the one segment that matters most to Safaricom's bottom line.</p><p><em>All figures sourced from the Communications Authority of Kenya Q2 FY2025/26 Sector Statistics Report covering October to December 2025. Full report available at ca.go.ke/statistics.</em></p>

The Airtel Rebellion: How Kenya's Underdog Is Attacking Safaricom Where It Hurts Most

Local Assembly or Global Surplus Offloading? The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Kenya's KSh 320M EV Plant

<h3>The "Involution" Crisis: Why China is Overflowing</h3><p>The term "<strong>Involution</strong>" (neijuan) has emerged as the defining economic struggle of 2025. It describes a state of "meaningless competition"—a cycle where an oversupply of goods meets stagnant domestic demand, forcing Chinese companies into brutal price wars that slash profit margins to the bone.</p><ul><li><p><strong>The Surplus Problem</strong>: China’s massive manufacturing engine continues to accelerate, yet domestic consumer confidence remains at historic lows.</p></li><li><p><strong>The Price War</strong>: In sectors ranging from heavy industry to consumer electronics, companies are selling products at or even below cost simply to defend their market share.</p></li><li><p><strong>The Export Pressure</strong>: Facing a record $1 trillion-plus trade surplus, China is desperate to offload this inventory into global markets to prevent a total domestic industrial collapse.</p></li></ul><ad-spot></ad-spot><h2>The Global Shield vs. The Kenyan Open Door</h2><p>As China attempts to export its way out of the Involution trap, the world’s major economies are raising their shields. The US and EU have implemented aggressive "de-risking" strategies and punitive tariffs to prevent their own industries from being crushed by subsidized, ultra-cheap imports.</p><p>Kenya, however, tells a different story. While the West builds barriers, our "open-door" policies have made us a primary destination for this surplus.</p><ul><li><p><strong>The Trade Gap:</strong> The numbers are staggering. In October 2025 alone, Kenya imported $622 million worth of goods from China while exporting a mere $13.2 million in return. This creates a monthly trade deficit of $609 million, a gap that drains Kenya's foreign exchange reserves.</p></li><li><p><strong>Automotive Dumping</strong>: As China pivots rapidly toward Electric Vehicles (EVs), it is offloading massive quantities of gasoline-powered vehicles and spare parts into African markets. In 2025, automotive spare parts dominated the illicit trade sector in Kenya, with the Anti-Counterfeit Authority reporting that four-wheeler accessories account for 81.8% of seized counterfeit goods.</p></li></ul><h2>The Long-Term Cost: "Premature De-industrialization"</h2><p>The danger isn't just the influx of cheap goods; it’s the systemic erosion of the Kenyan manufacturing dream.</p><ul><li><p><strong>Job Losses</strong>: The Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) has warned that the flood of cheap imports, combined with rising operational costs, has placed over 60,000 direct manufacturing jobs at risk as of late 2025.</p></li><li><p><strong>Unfair Competition</strong>: Local firms are being forced to shutter or relocate because they cannot compete with "dumped" goods that are subsidized by the Chinese government.</p></li><li><p><strong>The Stifled Dream</strong>: Kenya’s aspiration to be a regional tech hub is in a stranglehold. Local assembly for smartphones and PCs is caught between high taxes on imported components and an overwhelming surge of finished Chinese imports.</p></li></ul><p>The Shipment Surge: In 2024, Kenya imported over 2.3 million smartphones from China—a 71.5% increase from the previous year. While this benefits consumer connectivity, it prevents local assembly plants from reaching the scale they need to survive.</p><ad-spot></ad-spot><h2>Trade Policy: Kenya’s "Open Door" vs. The EU’s "Shield"</h2><p>The divergence in trade strategy between Kenya and the EU highlights a fundamental choice between immediate consumer convenience and long-term economic survival.</p><table style="min-width: 75px;"><colgroup><col style="min-width: 25px;"><col style="min-width: 25px;"><col style="min-width: 25px;"></colgroup><tbody><tr><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Features</p></th><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Kenya's Approach (2025)</p></th><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>EU "Special Safeguards" (2025)</p></th></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Primary Goal</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Maintaining "Free Trade" and safeguarding bilateral ties.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Protecting domestic industry and reducing "strategic dependence."</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Mechanisms </p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>WTO valuation and cargo verification to catch tax evasion. </p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>"Import Surveillance Task Force" to trigger punitive duties on surges.</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Action Taken</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Zero-tariff treatment for 100% of certain tariff lines from China.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Implementing "contingency plans" including steel safeguards and EV tariffs.</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Local Impact</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Record trade deficits; Chinese exports outpace Kenyan exports by ~40:1.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Active "ReSourceEU" program to diversify supply chains.</p></td></tr></tbody></table><p>While the EU uses Article 5 of the WTO Agreement to reintroduce duties the moment an import surge threatens their local market, Kenya has leaned into a "Comprehensive Strategic Partnership." Critics argue this leaves the country without the necessary protectionist shields to nurture its own industry.</p><h2>Deep Dive: "Blurred Corruption" in Infrastructure</h2><p>"Blurred corruption" is not always about direct bribes; it is about opaque contractual structures that create a closed economic loop designed to benefit the lending country over the host nation.</p><h3>1. The Standard Gauge Railway (SGR)</h3><p>The SGR is a textbook example of an "imagined future" that has led to debt distress.</p><ul><li><p><strong>The Loop: </strong>With 90% of the project funded by China's Export-Import Bank, contracts stipulated that the China Road and Bridges Corporation (CRBC) would handle construction and maintenance. This ensured the loan money essentially flowed from one Chinese entity to another, bypassing the Kenyan economy.</p></li><li><p><strong>Labor Disparity</strong>: Despite the massive scale, the project primarily utilized Chinese materials and reserved high-skill engineering roles for Chinese nationals, leaving only low-paid manual labor for the local workforce.</p></li></ul><ad-spot></ad-spot><h3>2. The Nairobi Expressway</h3><p>Though framed as a Public-Private Partnership (PPP), the Expressway follows a similar logic of "access for infrastructure."</p><ul><li><p><strong>Exchange Risk Protection</strong>: Toll fees were significantly increased in 2025 to "cushion" the Chinese investors against the depreciation of the Shilling. This shifts the entire economic burden of currency fluctuation onto the Kenyan motorist.</p></li><li><p><strong>Financial Control: </strong>Operated by Moja Expressway (a Chinese contractor), the revenue stream from this critical Kenyan infrastructure stays within a Chinese-managed ecosystem for decades to come.</p></li></ul><h2>Conclusion: The Path Forward</h2><p>If Kenya is to avoid becoming a permanent safety valve for China’s economic "involution," it must move beyond being a passive consumer. Strengthening local manufacturing, enforcing stricter anti-dumping laws, and demanding more transparent infrastructure contracts are not just policy options—they are requirements for national economic sovereignty.</p>

Industry

The Airtel Rebellion: How Kenya's Underdog Is Attacking Safaricom Where It Hurts Most

Local Assembly or Global Surplus Offloading? The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Kenya's KSh 320M EV Plant

The Involution Trap: Is Kenya Becoming China’s Economic Safety Valve?