The country’s telco giant Safaricom plc CEO Peter Ndegwa’s term lapses in March 2023 and the board of directors is divided on whether to renew his contract or not.
During his tenure at the helm of the country’s biggest corporate entity, Safaricom has hired 500 technology experts, mostly software developers, to help drive its new strategy.
One such contract is the rollout of the Hustler Fund, of which Safaricom remains a key player.
In the Financial Year ended March 31, 2022, Safaricom saw its profits dip by 1.7 per cent to close the year with a net profit of Sh67.49 billion, down from Sh68.7 billion the previous year.
Having reported a Sh6.8billion drop in net profit to Sh30.2billion for the six months’ period ended September 2022, he is focused on turning in a profit from the Ethiopia operations, which weighed on the telco’s performance last year.
Safaricom launched operations in Ethiopia in October 2022 and has since netted over two million subscribers.
Being a systemically important company due to the sensitive communication and M-Pesa services it offers, the appointment or renewal of Safaricom CEO’s tenure tends to attract interest from the highest office in the land.
In corporate governance terms, the telco’s two biggest shareholders — the National Treasury and UK multinational, Vodafone — have the biggest control on the board whose responsibility it is to appoint or renew a CEO’s contract.
On average, Safaricom nets between 15,000 and 22,000 new subscribers in Ethiopia each day.
During the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020, Safaricom implemented a number of transaction fee waivers for its financial services.
Safaricom waived deposit of funds in bank accounts and fees on M-Pesa transactions below Sh1,000.
Ndegwa has grown M-Pesa from 2,300 transactions per second to 2,600 and intends to capitalise on the Internet of Things (IoT) which involves embedding technology with physical objects and utilities to ease service delivery.
He replaced Bob Collymore, who died of cancer on July 1, 2019.
Until his appointment as Safaricom CEO, Ndegwa served as the Managing Director of Diageo Continental Europe, a British multinational alcoholic beverages company.
Prior to that, he was the East African Breweries Limited’s Group Chief Finance Officer, and the Executive Director of the firm’s Board of Directors.