Interesting numbers from Safaricom's Financial Year 2023 results

Earlier in the day, Safaricom announced its results from the just-ended financial year. They also had big news about their Ethiopian subsidiary getting a license to operate its mobile money service, M-Pesa, in the large Eastern Africa country.

While those are obviously big news, something else in the presentation by Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa and CFO Dilip Pal to investors and other stakeholders present caught our eye:

There are over 20 million smartphones on the Safaricom network. 20.3 million, to be exact, a 10% increase, year-over-year.
Safaricom’s 4G network covers 97% of the Kenyan population.
2.3 million new 4G smartphones were added to the Safaricom network in the past financial year (ended March 2023).
M-Pesa Go, the mobile money service targeted at teenagers that was launched late last year, has already registered Kshs 10.3 million value in transactions.
Another Kshs 1.88 billion value in transactions has been registered on the M-Pesa Global virtual card that was launched mid-last year. Over 600,000 of those virtual Visa cards have been issued since launch. Given that those cards expire after 6 months of inactivity and one will need to have another issued and activated, it will be interesting to see this number plotted against the actual users. You know, just to get a good sense of the numbers.
Over Kshs 1 billion has been transacted through the interoperable Pay Bill/Buy Goods service launched last year.
Safaricom currently has 205 5G sites live and active in half (23) of Kenya’s 47 counties. The company is targeting 800 by year’s end.
Kshs 24.44 billion has been disbursed to 15.8 million ~~hustlers~~ Kenyans through M-Pesa in the Hustler Fund (phase 1: targeting individuals only). The Hustler Fund can be accessed through a short code on the Safaricom network or the M-Pesa app. Details here.
The M-Pesa super app has now been downloaded 7.4 million times. This number from Safaricom marries with the Play Store tally of “over 5 million”. It has seen at least 34 transactions per user per month from the 1.2 million active monthly users. The nearly half a billion (489.1 million) transactions done on the app so far have seen Kshs 1.3 trillion transacted, netting Safaricom revenues of Kshs 6.7 billion just from the app alone.
Safaricom is the number one mobile network operator in Kenya with a 65.6% market share. The telco leads in data (65%), fixed data (46.1%), voice (65.9%) and SMS (89.2%).