There was a prevailing sentiment then that Safaricom had matured. A series of regulatory actions had sparked a devastating price war that reduced mobile call rates by 75 per cent. In 2010, just as Mr Collymore’s appointment was being announced, the Indian telecoms giant Bharti Airtel was negotiating to buy Zain Africa for Sh1 trillion ($1 billion). The plan by the Indian operator was to hammer Safaricom to the ground. Investors too had taken a grim view of the company’s prospects and they had sold Safaricom’s shares on the Nairobi Stock Exchange (now Nairobi Securities Exchange) to the point where the company was now half the value it had been listed two years earlier in one of Kenya’s largest and most publicised initial public offering of shares.

The business growth had plateaued, and many pundits argued – wrongly, it turned out – that the mobile telephone market was saturated.

“At the time I was coming in, many people thought this is not really the right time to join a company like this because it can only go down from here but I did not find that very daunting. I said, ‘let me come and do the job and see how we will get on with it’,” Mr Collymore said.

To stop the industry spiraling down into a dramatic catastrophe, Mr Collymore decided to increase prices.

“That was one tough decision,” he says. But it paid off handsomely as the company was able to build reserves for which to build the company that it has now become.

Securing the future, he says, was the reason for the price increase and other industry players quietly stopped the price war and followed suit away from the limelight. Since then, the company has made huge investments to grow the business, leading to the rapid growth.

“Our next phase was putting fibre in the ground or putting fibre on poles to serve connected customers because we really do believe in democratisation of data,” he says.

Over the last six years, Safaricom has invested about Sh30 billion a year in improving and expanding its network which now covers about 95 per cent of the population.

Here we go again
Airtel appoints new Kenyan CEO as El Youssefi exits
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