Bob Collymore to remain Safaricom CEO for 2 more years

During the release of the firm’s financial results today, board chairman Nicholas Ng’ang’a announced that Collymore’s contract had been renewed for an additional two years.

Mr Collymore’s contract ends in August 2015, having been extended for two years in 2013. The Safaricom boss took over from founding CEO Michael Joseph in August 2010, and has seen the company grow into a regional giant in terms of revenues and profitability.

Under his tenure, Safaricom has been able to achieve a lot including its market value of the Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed (NSE) telecom soaring to a record Kshs 630 billion from the range of about Kshs 300 billion it was valued at less than two years ago.

He has also overseen the bringing back of M-Pesa servers home after eight years of the servers being hosted in Germany. Also through Collymore’s tenure MPesa, currently contributes 20 per cent of total revenue, driven by a 14 per cent increase in 30 day active MPesa customers to 13.9 million as well as an increase in the average number of transactions per customer.

Safaricom’s revenue has also grown to Sh163.4 billion as at the year ended March 2015 from Kshs 94.8 billion in March 2011.

Through his leadership, the company launched its 4G network and got awarded by the Government of Kenya security tender, where they will oversee the building of the National Police Network in Nairobi and Mombasa.

Some of the notable innovations launched during Collymore’s tenure are M-Shwari, Lipa na M-Pesa as well as Okoa Jahazi bundles and airtime launched, not to forget partnerships with various financial institutions. The spread use of the services and products has therefore increased customer base by 8 per cent to reach 23.3 million. M-Shwari product in partnership with Commercial Bank of Africa. M-Shwari offers customers a platform to save money on their mobile phones and later borrow loans that are repayable within a month.

Ahead of his new tenure, Mr. Collymore sasid that he is looking into growing Safaricom’s net income for FY16 to be in the range of Kshs 32 billion to Kshs 34 billion, and free cash flow expected to be in the range of Kshs 25 billion to Kshs 26 billion. He will also oversee the completion of the fibre connection of the first 1,000 buildings to further enhance the hosted PABX, fixed calling, fixed data, cloud services and managed services offering.

However, with the renewal of his contract the immediate challenge will be to deal with regulatory changes intended to introduce stringent rules for investigating abuse of dominance in the telecommunications and broadcasting market. The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) has proposed a set of 11 regulations meant to come into force by mid-June, including a Fair Competition and Equality of Treatment clause that empowers the CA to automatically declare any telecommunication firm with a market share of more than 50 per cent as dominant.