Safaricom Ethiopia has passed 15 million 90-day active subscribers. The company announced it on 3rd September 2026, five years after the Ethiopian government granted it a full-service Unified Telecommunications Service Licence on 9th July 2021.
A 90-day active subscriber is someone who has done something billable on the network in the past three months: a call, an SMS, or data. Operators report it because it strips out SIM cards that were sold and never used. Safaricom did not give a figure beyond “surpassed 15 million”, so the exact number is not public.
Safaricom Ethiopia is owned by a consortium that paid USD 850 million for the telecoms licence in 2021, then USD 150 million more in May 2023 for a separate permit from the National Bank of Ethiopia to run M-PESA, which went live that August. Safaricom PLC of Kenya held 54.1% of the unit at the end of March 2026, up from 51.3% after it injected KES 21.3 billion during the year and partners who sat out the round were diluted. Sumitomo Corporation holds 23.5%, British International Investment 9.5%, the International Finance Corporation 6.81% and Vodacom 6.02%. Shareholders have put around USD 2.65 billion into the company in total. It is the only private operator in a market the state-owned Ethio Telecom had entirely to itself until October 2022, when Safaricom Ethiopia switched on its first commercial services.
The growth is slowing
Safaricom Ethiopia reached 10 million 90-day active customers in July 2025, as we wrote at the time. It was at 13.6 million by 31 March 2026 and 14.7 million by 30 June 2026, adding 1.1 million in that quarter alone. Getting from there to 15 million took most of another quarter. The company is still signing people up, just slower than it did a year ago.
The network has flattened more sharply. Chief executive Wim Vanhelleputte says Safaricom Ethiopia has built “more than 3,500 network sites” covering “around 60% of the country’s population”, and calls that one of the fastest rollouts by a new operator in Africa. To the round number, those are the figures Safaricom reported for 31 March 2026, which we went through in May: 3,504 sites and 59.2% population coverage. The release gives no updated count, so how many sites went up over the six months since is not something you can work out from it. What is on the record is the spending. Safaricom cut Ethiopia capital expenditure to KES 18.7 billion in FY26, down 52.2% year on year, and has guided KES 6 to 9 billion for FY27. That is the budget of an operator that has finished building.
All those sites are 4G and, in the company’s phrasing, 5G-ready. No 5G is running. Ethiopia has not allocated Safaricom 5G spectrum, so 5G-ready describes radios that can be upgraded once spectrum is issued. If you are on Safaricom in Addis Ababa today, the fastest connection available to you is 4G. Ethio Telecom already runs 340 5G sites and plans 648 by June 2027.
For scale, Ethio Telecom closed its year to June 2026 with 90.12 million total customers and 72.09 million active mobile subscribers, and 4G signal covering 82.23% of the population. Safaricom Ethiopia is a distant second in a two-horse race.
What “approaching breakeven” means
The release says the company is approaching breakeven without saying breakeven on what. Safaricom’s target is EBITDA breakeven by the end of the financial year ending March 2027. EBITDA is earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, which means it ignores the cost of the network that has already been built. In FY26 the Ethiopian unit lost KES 15.1 billion at that line, down from KES 43 billion the year before. Further down, it lost KES 30.1 billion at the EBIT line and KES 21.2 billion after everything. Safaricom has said it expects EBIT losses of KES 12 to 15 billion to remain even once EBITDA turns positive. Ethiopia making an actual profit is a separate and later event. For Safaricom shareholders in Nairobi, EBITDA breakeven means the Ethiopian unit stops draining cash month to month, not that it starts adding to group profit.
Revenue is climbing fast in local currency. Service revenue grew 130.9% to ETB 15.9 billion in FY26, and total revenue reached ETB 6.13 billion in the June 2026 quarter alone, up 66.1% year on year.
On community spending, Safaricom Ethiopia says it has put ETB 139 million directly into community projects, with shareholders and partners adding ETB 545 million, for ETB 684 million over four years. At September 2026 rates of about 161 birr to the dollar, that is roughly USD 4.25 million, or about KES 550 million.
March 2027 is the date to hold Safaricom to. EBITDA breakeven is the test the company set itself and it has not moved off it. Half-year results land in November, and they will show whether the subscriber base is still growing fast enough to get there.
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