The country’s third largest mobile service provider Telkom Kenya is banking on post-paid mobile subscribers to expand market share.
The telco yesterday unveiled new post-paid offerings in the latest move likely to stoke competition and price wars in a sector that has seen intense activity in the recent past.
Subscribers to Telkom post-pay services now have four options of post-paid bundles ranging from a base of Sh999 to Sh4, 999 per month.
Data from the industry regulator - the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) - indicates that mobile service providers in the country are yet to break into the post-pay subscriber market despite runaway growth in the sector over the past decade.
Hard pressed
The total number of post-paid subscribers stood at 1.4 million as at December 2017. This barely represents three per cent of the 42 million mobile phone users, according to the industry regulator.
For the base offer, Telkom users will get 300 minutes of off-net voice and 5GB of data while users of the premium post-paid bundle will receive 50GB of data and 2,000 minutes of off-net voice each month.
Subscribers will further receive unlimited on-net calls capped at 3,000 minutes each month and 3,000 text messages.
The introduction of the post-paid offers is targeted at corporate and individual working clients, with Telkom hard pressed to succeed where competitors did not.
Telkom currently has the least number of post-paid subscribers, with 10,000 out of the 3.8 million subscribers representing 0.26 per cent.
Safaricom currently leads the market with 1.2 million post-paid subscribers out of a total of 29.5 million mobile phone subscribers.
In 2014, the firm announced the shutting down of its Karibu post-paid tariffs after what it said was the offer failing to make economic sense.
Last month, Airtel Kenya launched new post-paid bundles, allowing subscribers to register for between Sh1, 499 and Sh2, 999 in exchange for 6GB and 30GB of data respectively, and 1,500 and 6,000 on-net minutes per month respectively. Telkom, which rebranded last year following the acquisition by UK private equity fund Helios, gained 400,000 new subscribers in the second quarter of the current financial year, putting its total subscriptions at 3.8 million.
