Telecom operator Yu Mobile has doubled its market share in the first quarter to 9.1 percent, with the company saying its efforts at increasing its subscription base with new offerings had paid off handsomely.
In a statement the company said it had landed over 100,000 new subscribers and hoped to continue increasing the number of subscribers. Given that the overall Kenyan telecom market grew by just 1.7 percent in the same quarter, such a growth is quite a feat.
CEO Madhur Taneja said that Yu had also seen an increase in minutes of usage (MoU) per subscriber, bucking the current market trend of a decline in MoU. The increase in subscribers comes after owners Essar invested over US$500 million into the Kenyan operations.
He added that “there is clearly a need for mobile telephony, particularly as mobile penetration has risen to 75.4 per 100 inhabitants, up from 74.0 per 100 inhabitants, but this could be higher if the environment allowed mobile telephony to be highly affordable.”
Yu warned the government’s regulator, the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) to rethink any increase in tariffs, as this would only adversely affect the growth of the sector.
Among Yu’s recent new offerings is the recent addition of BlackBerry services, which allowed the telecom to catch up with its rivals and offer subscribers easy access to e-mail, phone, text messaging and Internet from one device. They also gave away two months of free subscription.
The company announced last month that it is also targeting over 6,000 outlets for its mobile money transfer service yuCash in the next few months.
