On Wednesday 18th May 2011, Safaricom LTD released its audited results for the year ended 31st march 2011. Bob Collymore, Safaricom Group CEO and Chris Tiffin, Chief Finance Officer released the results.
Bob Collymore pointed out it was a tough year for Safaricom especially the last 8 months due to the rise in food prices which reduced the disposable income of the consumer. Also, the cost of equipment was on a steady rise thereby increasing costs. A He further added growth in data penetration especially in the MPESA docket has increased tremendously. The Voice segment, he added, has had turbulence (decreased from Kshs 64.576B in 2010 to Kshs 63.501B in 2011) but besides all that it has maintained market leadership.
The Key Highligts of the Results were:
Growth in:
-Active customers by 8.8% from 17.2M from 31st March 2010
- Revenue by 12.9% from Kshs 83.96 B to Kshs94.8B.
- Total Data brought 24.696B
-SMS brought in Kshs 7.544B from Kshs 5.191B last year
-Mobile and fixed data revenue up by 80.3% to Kshs 5.4B
- Number of fixed data connections up by 466% to 4,483
- Mobile data customers up 85.6% to 4.9M
- Acquisition revenue from Kshs 3.661 B in 2010 to Kshs 6.635 e.g driven by the sale of subsidised laptops like in the Wezesha program and sales of 934,000 cellphones of which 50% were data enabled
-MPESA revenue up by 56% from Kshs 7.556B to Kshs 11.784B
- MPESA registered customers are now 13.8M or 81% of the customer base
-Investment in sites by increasing by 338 sites to make the grand total to 2 and a half thousand sites
- WIMAX sites by 46 to 186 sites
- MPESA which now has over 657 paybill partners in over 46 countries, 26,948 agents countrywide and transferred $642M in 2010 and in the first 3 Months of 2011 transferred $200M
The Profit before & after tax stood at Kshs 18.361B & Kshs 13.159B which was lower than last year’s Kshs 20.967B. & 15.148B respectively. Bob Collymore then announced that the board of directors had proposed a payment of Kshs 0.20 per share which it was a Kshs 8B payout to be paid on or before 8 December 2011. This was a 60% payout as compared to 50% payout last year.
In summary, Safaricom managed to keep revenue streams flowing while counteracting the turbulent tough environment and we hope they will post even better results in the next financial year.
