88 million SIMs, and the feature phone is finally losing

The Communications Authority's quarterly numbers landed this week, and read together they describe a country with 88 million SIMs, 52 million smartphones and 34,007 fewer mobile money agents than it had three months ago.

Featured · Telcos

Kenya reached 87.99 million SIM subscriptions by June 2026, up 4.6% on March's 84.09 million — but the device count tells the clearer story. Of 79.7 million connected handsets, 52.26 million are smartphones and 27.42 million feature phones, a 65.6/34.4 split. In one quarter smartphones added 2.08 million units while feature phones shed 1.11 million, and the longer arc is starker: feature phones have fallen from 32.5 million in March 2025 to 27.4 million now. Mobile data subscriptions stand at 64.26 million, of which 54.93 million are broadband, and the average user burns 15.1GB a month — while those on 5G average 53.5GB.

Source: TechTrends KE

Mobile masts against a cloudy sky — Kenya now counts 88 million SIM subscriptions

FINTECH

Mobile money grew. The agents didn't.

Subscriptions rose 1.2% to 54.01 million while registered agents fell 5.6% to 568,463 — 34,007 gone in a quarter, immediately after a quarter that added over 101,000. The CBK counts differently again, reporting 572,104 active agents in June against 548,010 in April, so the two regulators are not measuring the same thing. What is not ambiguous is the earnings: average annual commission per M-Pesa agent is KSh112,244, down from KSh124,720 last year and KSh144,355 in 2024. Roughly 30% of transaction volume now runs through person-to-merchant and QR rails, yet agents still handled 212.45 million cash transactions worth KSh682.46 billion in June alone. The cash-out business is shrinking per head, not disappearing.

TechTrends KE

TELCOS

Safaricom gained where the market grew, held where it didn't

Safaricom's mobile subscription share rose to 69.8% from 68.9% as the market added nearly 4 million connections. Its mobile broadband share was flat — 64.5% to 64.4% — on a market of 54.9 million, and M-Pesa's share of mobile money slipped from 89.1% to 88.8% while that market grew from 53.4 to 54 million. Three services, three different competitive stories: Safaricom absorbed most of the new SIMs, while Airtel's gains in money and data were enough to move the share needle only a fraction.

TechTrends KE

INFRASTRUCTURE

Fixed internet up 32% — and Starlink had to stop selling

2.84 million fixed connections by June, growing 32.4% year on year, with fibre at 1.57 million and still more than half the market. Satellite is about 27,700 subscriptions, roughly 1%, of which Starlink Kenya holds 27,616 — a service that paused residential sign-ups in high-demand counties this year because it ran out of capacity. International bandwidth grew 18.5% to 28,950 Gbps across SEACOM, TEAMS, EASSy, Lion2, DARE1, PEACE and 2Africa. The sobering line: most connections sit below 30 Mbps, and just 1,853 subscriptions nationwide exceed 1 Gbps.

TechTrends KE

POLICY

Detected cyber threats fell 30%. That is not the same as fewer attacks.

KE-CIRT/CC logged 2.36 billion threat events in the April–June quarter, down 30% on the previous quarter and 48.3% from Q2's 4.56 billion, while advisories issued edged up to 20.75 million from 20.58 million. System attacks and vulnerability probes made up over 3.2 billion of the detections. The number counts automated scanning, not confirmed breaches, so a falling total says as much about scanning volume as about safety — and against it, ESET recorded a 145% rise in QR-code phishing in Kenya between late 2025 and mid-2026.

TechTrends KE