Michael Joseph, Safaricom CEO plans to retire by end 2010 Photo: The Economist
NAIROBI (Reuters) – The head of Safaricom plans to step down by the end of 2010 after a decade at the helm, during which he turned the telecoms firm into east Africa’s biggest company by market capitalisation.
“I am planning to retire sometime in 2010, that’s my intention,” Chief Executive Officer Michael Joseph told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.
Joseph said he had also offered to retire last year.
The company typically accounts for more than half the shares traded each day on the Nairobi Stock Exchange.
“This is a company I built up from scratch. I could not walk away from this company unless I was confident my successor was up to it,” he said, declining to comment on who might take over.
Joseph also said he expected a quarter of the firm’s revenue to come from data services within two years as the number of mobile Internet users and subscribers to Safaricom’s money transfer service, M-Pesa, continued to increase.
“Our intention is that 25 percent of our revenue in two years time will come from data. It’s probably about 13 percent right now,” he said.
Safaricom, which is 40 percent owned by Britain’s Vodafone, says it has over 15 million active SIM subscribers, giving it roughly 80 percent of the mobile telecoms market in east Africa’s biggest economy.
Joseph said more than 3 million Safaricom users now accessed the Internet on a mobile phone, or via a portable modem.
But he said the potential number of mobile Internet users could easily top 10 million in Kenya, where infrastructure is still poor and mobile Internet penetration is below 10 percent.
“This should easily be 10 or 20 percent over the next two years,” he said.
M-Pesa now has 9.3 million registered users in a country where the majority of people do not have access to a bank.
“We’re doing about 15 million dollars a day in transactions,” Joseph said.
In November, Safaricom said daily transactions amounted to $10 million daily.
He said Safaricom planned to expand M-Pesa access to Uganda and Tanzania this year, but a new service targeting remittances from Britain had disappointed so far.
“We are only in the UK, and it is not as simple as in Kenya where I can set up 16,000 dealers. We don’t have that infrastructure, we still have to build a presence there.”
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