Airtel targets network expansion, mobile money in Safaricom battle

Airtel Africa’s Kenyan arm is accelerating a push to break Safaricom’s dominance in East Africa’s biggest economy, its managing director told Semafor.

Kenya’s second-largest telecoms company grew faster than its larger rival in the first four months of this year, but wants to ramp that pace up. Airtel Kenya’s Managing Director Ashish Malhotra said he wanted to drive further growth by increasing his company’s network of 4,300 mobile-phone towers — which have already nearly doubled in the last three years — by around a third in the next three years, to extend the company’s reach into underserved rural areas.

He also wants to double the company’s 120,000 mobile money agents within two years. Airtel Kenya’s network of agents, which enables customers to deposit and withdraw physical cash, has already more than doubled from its level two years ago.

Airtel Kenya — one of Airtel Africa’s 14 country‑level subsidiaries — had 24.5 million active SIM cards at the end of March, up 14% from the end of December. By comparison, Safaricom’s user base grew by 3.6% over the same period, although with 48.2 million subscribers, it maintained its grip on the Kenyan market.

Safaricom’s M-Pesa platform is also by far the most widely used mobile money service in Kenya. Malhotra said he sees a “big” opportunity in mobile money because there is room for “huge growth,” partly due to changes implemented by the central bank last year that made it easier to make transfers between different networks. “It is a greenfield area we are getting into and we’re very excited about that,” he said.

Malhotra, during a wide-ranging interview in Nairobi, also discussed Airtel’s plans to build a 24-megawatt data center in a special economic zone near Nairobi called Tatu City. He said the project, operated by Airtel Nxtra — the data center arm of parent company Bharti Airtel — was due to be operational by the fourth quarter of 2027.

“With digital inclusion growing and the data traffic going up at a very high pace, more and more SMEs and big corporates are digitizing, and that requires data capacity,” he said.

Ethiopia’s telecoms industry was widely seen as a major prize when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government announced the privatization of state-owned Ethio Telecom after he took office in 2018. The move, part of a broader liberalization of the economy, offered access to Africa’s second-largest population of around 120 million people.

Safaricom, which is partly owned by South Africa’s Vodacom and the UK’s Vodafone, in 2021 won Ethiopia’s first telecoms license and launched in the country the following year. The company was initially hit by currency volatility and insecurity, but in May it said its overall earnings could increase by up to 50% this financial year because losses in Ethiopia were projected to fall steeply.