There are many things I find truly fascinating about Safaricom. Things like Blaze.

Plus, even though they are the biggest (close to 70% market share), they don’t seem to be stopping any time soon. They are no longer just a telecoms company.

We don’t want to become a company for everything, we want to become a platform for everything. And in fact we’ve even moved on from using the word platform. We now use the word raft because platform is something which sits still. A raft is something which moves. And the world that we’re in today is moving at a particularly rapid pace. – Bob Collymore interview with Business Daily

When news of Little, their taxi hailing app, started spreading, I thought it wouldn’t work. Months later, it seems like they are progressing well.

Then weeks ago came the news of Safaricom Fibre in homes. And I was excited only to later realise, the service is only still available in some estates in Nairobi. Hopefully this will expand to other parts of Kenya.

Then…

Safaricom is about to ruin the e-commerce party. Brace yourselves! pic.twitter.com/C0hZWqzyGf
— Muthuri Kinyamu (@MuthuriKinyamu) February 14, 2017

This Valentine’s we heard of something very new from Safaricom, an e-commerce platform called SafMall.

Okay not so new exactly. Plus, we may all be wrong because we already have Safaricom Shop online. This may just be an upgrade. But then again Safaricom tweets…

We are currently in trials for an exciting new e-commerce proposition which is currently being piloted by staff internally ahead of rollout.
— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) February 14, 2017

Internally, amongst its staff, Safaricom was testing a new e-commerce platform with Flash sales of ridiculously priced phones. Maybe as a test of what the site can/should handle.

The fact that these were just phones “on sale” made me feel skeptical that it would just be a revamping of Safaricom Shop. But remember Jumia, Kilimall etc, thrive (I’d love to think) on smartphones and electronics.

This might be real. And it would be a big disruption.

A check-up on Safmall.co.ke, which I consider will be the URL shows me the following:

Okay! This may take a while. Or may come as soon as next month.

If this happens, then Jumia and Kilimall are in for something they may have never planned for.

Think of it:

Quality of products – Jumia has a lot of issues on this
Getting people to know about the platform – Safaricom controls close to 70% market
Offers – aha!
Easy payments – Lipa na Mpesa
Delivery – note that Safaricom backs up an on-demand delivery company called Sendy