Safaricom Full Year Results: Safaricom has today announced a record net profit of Sh. 63.4 billion. This came as the company posted a profit growth of 14.7 per cent in the year ended March 2019. This growth generated an earnings per share of Sh. 1.58 per share.
During the financial year, revenue hit a record Sh. 240.3 billion. Revenue generated from voice service grew by 0.3 percent to Sh. 95.9 billion. In the same year revenue from M-Pesa grew by 19.2 per cent to Sh. 74.9 billion.
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This means that revenue was driven largely by M-Pesa, which grew by 19 per cent and accounted for 75 per cent of the growth in 2018. Now, M-Pesa accounts for 51 per cent of Safaricom’s service revenue. In the same vein, M-Pesa subscribers grew by 19.2 per cent from 16.6 million to 22.6 million.
Following the financial results, the company announced that it will pay out a special dividend of Sh. 24.8 billion in addition to the normal dividend of Sh. 50 billion. This means that the recommended dividend pay will be Ksh. 1.25 per share and a special dividend of Ksh. 0.62 per share for the year ended March 31, 2019.
Strikingly, the company als0 announced that its Fuliza platform has given loans of upto Sh. 45 billion since it was launched in January 2019. “We launched the Fuliza after realizing that customers were canceling millions of M-Pesa transactions every day due to insufficient funds in their mobile wallets,” said safaricom CEO Bob Collymore.
The company also announced plans to double 4G sites countrywide.
Overall, the company added 2.3 million customers to the Safaricom network. This represented a 58 per cent increase from the 1.4 million customers the company added in the previous financial year.
The Safaricom full year results have now entrenched the company as one of the most profitable businesses in the African continent.