There is no innovation going on at Safcom. It is a shame for the tonnes of money that it makes. It should have sprouted a couple of start-ups which would compete on the world stage and look to IPO in Nasdaq or NYSE. You can literally run it with your eyes closed, auto-pilot. It has no competition to talk of. Safcom badly needs a real innovator manager. Their next tier managers after Michael Joseph are just clueless and not business managers at all, leave alone being tech savvy.
Mpesa has been their boon, it has helped Safcom retain/hold-on to its subscriber base because of the "network effect". Safcom has benefitted from soft regulation also known as state capture and i agree with Pundit better state unbundled its stake and makes the billion dollars while it is still riding high. In a different market Mpesa would already have been flagged and unbundled as a financial service/bank and not a telco VAS service. This is literally a national payment system and Ethiopia wont make the same mistake as Kenya by allowing a non-regulated service like Mpesa; at very worst Mpesa may be under regulator or CBE (Commercial Bank of Ethiopia), their "KCB", which is literally like their Central Bank.
Safcom is a seating duck, some disruptive tech or business will literally send it into a serious contraction. Voice has been a major revenue earner, but voice is being commoditized and a "dying" dependable line of business. Safcom has milked this.... even as the most expensive calling charges in the market. I agree with Robina, 5G satellite could be it. I heard Tesla has launched or is launching Starlink or something like that. Literally raining down satellites for a global IP network blanketing the world. This will be a game changer! Today we had an outage on SEACOM and almost all the service providers were out. It tells you that we have no real redundancy and the so called redundant links with the likes of TEAMs and the other undersea providers are literally also using SEACOM as their service provider! Satellite would have been a reliable redundant link.
I see some disruptive OTP service killing the voice service as we know it. This is why most operators are throttling OTP, but this can't last for long. In Dubai, they throttle Whatsapp calling. There are already ways to get around this. In-country regulatory regime are a dying holdover. Soon you could literally have a global mobile phone and you don't have to be regulated by your corrupted/state-captured domicile regulator.
Robina, time to talk about that idea you had on taking on Mpesa in Kenya.... going for Pesalink land-grab and building an open-API ecommerce/mobile money ecosystem around it. Bingo! a real Game changer that would turn Mpesa on its head. Also a currency backed (shilling) crypto-currency. To be honest, long before Facebook decided that their (Ca)Libra will be a currency backed crypto, Mpesa is actually a shilling backed crypto-currency. You literally hold an e-currency in your e-wallet with the confidence that when you go to the Mpesa agent, he/she will give you a shilling for every 1 unit of what you hold in your e-wallet.
