Safaricom Posts Record KSh 95.6bn Profit, Pays Biggest Dividend Ever

Safaricom PLC delivered the strongest financial results in its 25-year operating history for the financial year ending March 2026, reporting attributable profit of KSh 95.61 billion — a record for any financial year since the company's founding. The telecommunications giant simultaneously declared the largest corporate dividend ever paid in Kenya, distributing KSh 80.13 billion to its shareholders and setting a new benchmark for corporate returns in East Africa's business history.

Revenue Crosses the KSh 400 Billion Threshold

Group service revenue rose 11.5% year-on-year to KSh 414.14 billion, crossing the KSh 400 billion mark for the first time in Safaricom's history. The milestone underscores the company's successful transformation from a traditional voice and data carrier into a diversified digital services platform operating across Kenya and Ethiopia. Revenue growth was driven by sustained subscriber expansion, sharply increased data consumption, the deepening adoption of enterprise digital solutions and the continued monetisation of the M-Pesa financial services ecosystem.

EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation — grew by an impressive 27.9% to KSh 220.26 billion, with the EBITDA margin recovering 720 basis points to reach 51.5%. Analysts noted that the margin expansion reflects Safaricom's ability to grow revenue significantly faster than its cost base — a sign of operational discipline and the inherent scalability of digital services infrastructure once the fixed-cost base is fully deployed and amortised across a growing subscriber pool.

M-Pesa Remains the Engine of Growth

M-Pesa, the mobile money platform that Safaricom pioneered in 2007 and which has since become a globally celebrated model for financial inclusion, continued to be the company's primary growth engine in FY2026. M-Pesa revenue reached KSh 182.7 billion, up 13.4% year-on-year, accounting for 45.6% of total Kenya service revenue — nearly half of everything the company earns in its home market from a single platform.

The most striking metric within M-Pesa's performance was the explosive growth of its merchant base, which expanded 71.0% year-on-year to reach 3.1 million active merchants. This growth reflects the deepening penetration of M-Pesa into Kenya's formal and informal retail economy, as small traders, restaurants, service providers and large corporates alike increasingly rely on the platform for their day-to-day payment processing.

Record Dividend Rewards Long-Suffering Shareholders

The declaration of a KSh 80.13 billion dividend — the largest in the history of Kenya's corporate sector — provides significant and long-awaited reward for Safaricom's diverse shareholder base. The company's major shareholders include the Kenyan government through the National Treasury, which holds approximately 35%, alongside Vodacom Group and thousands of retail investors who hold shares through the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

A Quarter-Century of Transformation

Safaricom's FY2026 results arrive as the company reflects on 25 years of transforming Kenya's telecommunications and financial services landscape. From a modest mobile network operator at its launch to a KSh 400 billion revenue enterprise with one of the largest market capitalisations on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the journey has fundamentally reshaped how Kenyans communicate, pay, save, borrow and invest.