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Telkom Kenya CEO on firm’s performance, merger and growing market share

NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 14-Telkom Kenya, one of the country’s telecommunications service providers says it is pursuing its own journey to better its products for consumer use.

Capital Business spoke to the company’s Chief Executive Officer Mugo Kibati on the various steps the company is taking to ensure growth.

How has Telkom weathered the COVID-19 pandemic that has led to an uptake in consumption of Digital services?

First and foremost, for us the most immediate and most urgent need was to make sure that our employees and our customers were all safe. We instituted measures that would protect our employees and customers.

Secondly in terms of our business, remote work and studying was a huge opportunity for the sector. However, for us it was a bit of an unexpected challenge initially because we had to work on our network across the country because many people moved away from their offices to their homes.

We took the opportunity to assess the developments around the pandemic and we took an exercise to reimagine the world in the a time of COVID 19.

However, the fact of the matter is that in the wider economy, people suffered tremendous losses and that includes our employees.

Have there been any redundancies at Telkom since the outbreak of the pandemic?

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Our employees and our customers were our priority. We worked very hard not to add to the misery that we knew all of us were going through.

While we had certain challenges especially in our corporate business, we did have an uplift on the residential side of business and the general utilization of our mobile communications.

That sort of made up for the losses from the enterprise side of the business and so we did not have to take any such measures.

What is your current customer base and what are you doing to improve your value proposition against your competition?

We have been growing steadily as Telkom, but not as fast as I like. We have about 4 million subscribers on our network.

In terms of staying ahead of the competition, I have a very different way of thinking.

I think we have our own path as Telkom Kenya, the technology space is evolving rapidly.

The space is huge and if we are seated looking at our neighbors next door somebody could hit us on our head from anywhere.

So I am not too concerned what our competitor is doing. What we have done is developed a strategy that is a Telkom strategy.

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For instance, our own unique assets: Telkom’s terrestrial fibre network is comparable to no one else’s.

We are the gateway into the East and Central African region for international communications through our two landing stations in Mombasa which we are going to build a smart hub.

Therefore, we have chartered our own strategy for growing and transforming Telkom into a technology company.

We are cognizant of the fact that the ecosystem includes not just our local indigenous competitors. Technology is changing and competitors from across the globe are going to come into the market and we need to be ready for that.

How confident are you that you will always win as the industry changes?

Telkom has been existence for over 70 years in very many incarnations and we have been changing so I have no qualms about the future.

I think now with the changes we are making into how we are conducting our business, I am confident that we will be able to take on any of the challenges coming our way.

I have challenged our employees that we will be the ones to come up with solutions for the rest of the country and the world.

Besides investment in the network, what else is Telkom doing to stay competitive in the sector and to increase its market share?

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As Telkom we continue building our network to make sure that we keep up and are able to provide efficient quality services to our customers.

I want to assure our customers while we may not always be perfect, we are making investments to make our network better every other day.

Beyond that we have decided that we are going to do a couple of additional things such as ramping up and enhancing our mobile money product T-kash which we relaunched this year.

We are also going to be launching an app that would make it easier to use T-kash.

The third thing is products that we are expecting to launch, including the Madaraka life product which you will hear about as the days go by.

Will you pursue any mergers in future?

Anything is possible in the future. You never take anything off the table, but as we speak right now our focus is on growing Telkom Kenya and especially on adjusting that journey from a telco to a technology company.

We are also focusing on building a company that has a network that provides the highest quality voice and data and has the most innovative products for the market that we are in.

We are also encouraged by the policy measures we are seeing evolving from the Communications Authority of Kenya talking about making sure the consumer has the most affordable services possible

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We support the move and encourage it.

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