Like their counterparts in developed markets, mobile operators in Kenya are aggressively promoting data offerings, including mobile money transfer services and mobile internet, as they strive to develop new income streams and cut over-reliance on revenues from airtime sales.
The number of mobile subscribers in Kenya reached nearly 23 million at the end of last year, representing a mobile penetration rate of 63%. The country had the most intensive mobile internet users in Africa, with each user browsing an average of 525 pages monthly.
For Safaricom, the country's dominant carrier with a 80% share of the market, this presents both opportunities and challenges. The company, which is the only firm providing commercial 3G services, has been experiencing strong growth in its data business, which contributed 24% of its revenues in 1H2010, up 56% from a year earlier.
While Safaricom sees data as the next frontier, it's facing fierce competition as Airtel Kenya, formerly known as Zain Kenya, and Telkom Kenya are set to launch 3G services by the first quarter. Meanwhile, a continuous price war trigged by a reduction in interconnection charges across networks since last August also has driven Safaricom to invest significantly on network upgrades.
Backend challenge
To be able to withstand the growing mobile data traffic, Safaricom signed a three-year agreement late last year with Huawei Technologies to upgrade its wireless infrastructure, and conducted technical trials on LTE.
At the same time, Saraficom contracted Huawei to replace its legacy IN system with a convergent billing system (CBS) so the operator can quickly rollout new services and respond to customer needs.
The CBS consolidates and centralizes all of the operator's billing functions across multiple divisions and services as well as customer relationship management.
"It [convergent billing system] is almost like the holy grail of billing for us, and we're the first operator that has deployed the CBS in Kenya and East Africa," said Michael Joseph, the recently retired CEO of Safaricom. Joseph, who has ran Safaricom since the company was founded in 2000, stepped down from his position as CEO late last year. He now is a director.
The key benefit of the new platform, said Joseph, is faster turnaround for new products, services and promotions.
"With the previous IN platform, if we wanted to launch a service, we had to ask the vendor to design the service, because of the complexity of the platform," he explained. "But now we don't have to go back to the vendor, we can design and launch most of the new services in house."
Derry Li, VP of Huawei's next-generation business support solution division, said the CBS enables Safaricom to reduce time to market for new services from months to days and cut opex and capex by an estimated 30%.
The CBS system, Li said, supports various infrastructure networks and services and provides online rating, real-time control and express billing, thus greatly shortening time to market.