niche marketting would be such a great idea. the problem with the kenyan market(in particular) is the fact that there is lack of innovativeness, not just as individuals, but also in the corporate sector.

examples always cease to disappear. the mobile telephone market in kenya has had some enthusiasm driven creative ideas-what with the likes of the skiza, dunda callback tones, mpesa. the fact still remains............i came up with it, and you all jump in. i mean, why cant we come up with somethings more challenging, something that makes someone say wow. to be honest, am not even anywhere close to sayin good work.

The strangeness of cell phone business is that its all a numbers game. Customers switch all the time and complaints are higher than any industry. Customers are attracted by lower prices. The higher number of minutes increase costs as well revenues. Capacity costs tend to increase at a higher marginal rate and one way to know a company that's skimping on capacity is coverage/quality. If you have coverage but cannot call or quality is poor.

Yup! GPRS, EDGE, 3G, and all the other interesting gimmicks are ways of delivering QOS for their product (or at least promising to do so). Cellphone Internet is bad in every part of the world. Everyone has to market something don't they?

TEAMS, whatever happened to EASSY and all the other fiber projects. Ever heard the expression rising tides raise all ships. Lets see what happens, access kenya, etc. VOIP, etc will get in on the game as you say. First, we have to see more broadband at home (hopefully not the wireless variety coz its a trap that I've seen in action in the US, just google clearwire).

VOIP's not a threat to cellphones, most technology like skype, etc is not carrier grade, its encapsulated in other technology to provide passably good voice quality. VOIP's directed squarely at long distance wired telephony. Calling overseas becomes cheap as does calling between cities, especially for corporations that can afford excellent Internet.

You are right yet again with few competitors you dont know if you are getting a good deal. Wherever there are high economic profits there will be competitors that come to take it away.

Once upon a time someone told me that market share is not a business objective. You don't need market share to be highly profitable. Just be successful in your niche.

How is it that cell companies make the same average revenue per customer when calls from zain or orange to safcom are cheaper than the reverse? Intra-network calls within safcom are more expensive than zain and now orange has proven the fact that indeed safaricom has overcharging

True safcom has more customers, but that aint cast in stone, and given how relatively expensive their network is, i doubt this will remain for long. In my opinion, forget phone deals. I've seen folks redeem their bonga points for a phone, only to insert a celtel SIM card, ironic!

One may argue about their new 3G rollout. Thats good, but IMHO, advancing the phone as an internet device will eat into revenue realized from voice and messaging products. The rate of airtime unit consumption is far much higher for voice than for internet. The flipside is, when the TEAMS thingy shores up in 2009 and broadband enters the average home, new players like free VoIP operators yahoo/skype will emerge as competition to voice. Already the likes of yahoo mobile messenger are challenging the SMS segment revenues especially amongst the youth. The 3G move and the 20% stake in TEAMS was well calculated though and there could be significant revenue realizations on these fronts if and only if it could work smoothly. As for 3G-smooth, safcom has some distance to cover, especially in considering, the orange/telkom combo has far greater experience on the ISP front, and zain has a more stable internet product albeit anchored on the slower GPRS/EDGE technology.

For safcom to cling on to its numbers, we have to see sub-seven bob intra-network call prices, thats 30% reduction in revenue and another 40% or so reduction in inter-network calls. What is not evident to me is whether MPESA and 3G will compensate for the deficit.

My take is not very much. My few salient reasons:

- those low rates affect only new subscribers and switchers, which is a smaller customer base in nai & msa.

- All the cell companies make roughly the same income on their average customer, and saf'com has more customers.

- There needs to be a diversity of deals available, something that can differentiate from saf'com and zain.

Orange mobile has been launched. It has a flat rate of Sh3.50 per minute for subscribers calling a specified group and Sh7 fee to any other Orange or fixed line users. Calling Zain & Safaricom will cost Sh14 per minute. How will this impact on Safaricom revenues?