South Africa-headquartered Vodacom is entering its biggest strategic reset in decades after taking control of Safaricom, the Kenyan telecommunications giant behind one of Africa’s most successful mobile money platforms, M-PESA.
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- Vodacom increased its stake in Safaricom to 55%, gaining control of Kenya's largest mobile network operator with over 62 million customers and transforming Safaricom into a principal growth driver.
- The acquisition shifts Safaricom from an associate to full consolidation under IFRS, significantly altering Vodacom’s reported revenue, EBITDA, assets, and liabilities.
- Safaricom's M-PESA fintech platform processes over 100 million daily transactions and recently launched My OneApp, an AI-driven unified app combining telecom and financial services with features like AI Pay and personalized recommendations.
- Vodacom’s mobile money ecosystem handled nearly $548 billion in transactions over 12 months, boosting the group's digital financial service importance and prompting an increase in its Vision 2030 revenue target from R200 billion to over R300 billion.
- Vodacom’s growth is increasingly driven by faster-growing digital services and international markets such as Egypt, Tanzania, DRC, and Lesotho, with expanding revenues and financial services performance.
