Buried in Safaricom’s FY26 results is a number that has been a long time coming. Mobile data revenue reached KES 83.4 billion, contributing 42.1% of the company’s connectivity business in Kenya. Voice revenue came in at KES 81.8 billion, contributing 41.3%. For the first time in Safaricom’s 25-year history, mobile data is the largest single line in its connectivity business.
It is a quiet moment with significant meaning. It marks the end of voice as Safaricom’s dominant connectivity product, and it sets the stage for the company’s broader pitch: that it is no longer a telecom, but a technology company. The data on whether that pitch is real is mixed.
The connectivity inversion in context
Connectivity revenue (the combined total of voice, data, and messaging) grew 6.9% year-on-year to KES 197.9 billion. Mobile data grew 14.4% to KES 83.4 billion. Voice grew a modest 1.3% to KES 81.8 billion. Messaging fell 11.8% to KES 11.0 billion as customers continue to migrate to WhatsApp, Telegram and other over-the-top messaging platforms.
The mobile data growth story has three layers worth understanding.
First, devices. The number of 4G+ devices on the network grew 31.8% year-on-year to 30.8 million. 5G devices specifically grew 55.5% to 1.6 million. 2G feature phones declined 28.5%. This is the smartphone transition working through Safaricom’s customer base in real time, a pattern the company has been managing for over a decade.
Second, usage. Average data consumption per chargeable subscriber rose 16.6% to 4.92GB per month. The number of customers using more than 1GB per month grew 22.4% to 14.5 million. About half of Safaricom’s mobile data customers are now in this “heavy user” tier, which signals a meaningfully different customer profile from a few years ago.
Third, pricing. The rate per megabyte fell 12.1% to 5.44 cents. Safaricom is selling more data, to more customers, at lower per-unit prices. That is the standard mobile data growth model, and it is working. But it also means revenue growth depends on volume continuing to outpace price compression. There is a ceiling somewhere, even if it is not yet visible.
Voice, despite the framing, is not collapsing. It grew 1.3%, with minutes of use per subscriber up 5.4% to 211.6 minutes. The outgoing rate per minute fell 8.5% to KES 1.02, but customers used more minutes. Voice is plateauing, not dying. It will likely stay a 35–40% share of connectivity revenue for several more years.
Fixed broadband is the under-reported story
The headline numbers obscure how aggressively Safaricom’s Fixed Service & IoT business is growing. Revenue rose 12.2% to KES 20.2 billion. FTTH (Fibre to the Home) customers grew 35.0% to 407,080. Enterprise fixed customers grew 19.7% to 83,611.
The most interesting shift inside fixed broadband is the rise of 5G Fixed Wireless Access. FWA customers grew 53.0% year-on-year to 132,060. FWA contributed 52.3% of the year’s total fixed connection growth, more than fibre’s contribution. This is Safaricom using its 5G mobile network to deliver home broadband in places where running fibre is uneconomic. It is a clever workaround for the last-mile cost problem, not necessarily a triumph of 5G as a consumer product.
Safaricom now has 18,300 kilometres of metro fibre and 80% of its base stations are connected by fibre. That is a serious infrastructure foundation. It is also why independent network performance benchmarks consistently place Safaricom well ahead of Airtel and other operators on real-world speed and reliability metrics.
The Tech-Co question
Safaricom’s stated ambition is to become “Africa’s leading purpose-led technology company by 2030.” This is a meaningful rebrand. Originally, the same Tech-Co target was set for 2025. It has since been pushed back five years, which is itself a useful data point about how achievable the original framing was.
There is real evidence behind the claim. Fintech 2.0, the cloud-native rebuild of M-PESA’s underlying platform launched in October 2025, can now process 6,000 transactions per second with capacity to scale to 12,000. Daraja 3.0, the developer-facing API platform, has 3,300 registered developers and 34 published APIs. Safaricom says it has 70 AI and machine learning models in production across customer service, fraud prevention, and network operations. The company has 400-plus developers working in agile teams internally.
In the public sector, Safaricom has connected 6,500 public health facilities, registered 29.7 million citizens onto health platforms, and disbursed KES 74 billion through agri-tech fertiliser e-subsidy programmes. Through its universal payment wallets, the company has handled KES 54 billion in disbursements to 1.9 million beneficiaries, including HELB and Inua Jamii payments.
This is genuinely tech-company-adjacent work. The infrastructure, the developer ecosystem, and the public-sector platform business are real.
But there is a counter-case worth considering. By revenue composition, Safaricom is still overwhelmingly a telecom and financial services operator. M-PESA contributes 45.6% of Kenya service revenue, connectivity contributes 49.4%, and fixed and IoT contributes the remaining 5.0%. Pure technology services, software-as-a-service, cloud, and platform revenue do not appear as separate disclosed line items.
Real technology companies typically disclose research and development as a separate expense line. They report gross margins in the 60–80% range typical of software businesses. They derive meaningful revenue from licensing or subscription products. Safaricom’s results do not yet show these characteristics. The Kenya EBITDA margin of 56.8% is impressive for a telco, but it is a telco margin, not a software margin.
The fairest reading is that Safaricom is a telecom with serious technology ambitions and real underlying capability, not yet a technology company with telecom heritage. The distinction matters because it changes how investors should value the business.
What to watch
The most important Tech-Co indicator going forward is not slogans or strategy slides. It is whether the revenue mix gradually shifts toward genuinely platform-based, software-style products: API monetisation, cloud services, AI-as-a-service, embedded fintech for third parties. The platform exists. The 2030 deadline gives Safaricom four more financial years to demonstrate the shift.
For now, mobile data overtaking voice is the more concrete milestone. The Tech-Co claim remains a work in progress.
This is the third in a four-part series on Safaricom’s FY26 results. Read Part 1: M-PESA’s KES 183 billion year and Part 2: Safaricom Ethiopia. Coming next: who actually wins from Safaricom’s record KES 80 billion dividend.
