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The value of mobile commerce deals rose by 32.7 per cent in 2022 to Sh20.3 trillion from Sh7.9 trillion recorded the previous year.

The data from the 2023 Economic Survey underline the increasing penetration of smartphones in the country, with which Kenyans are accessing online commerce platforms.

This supports Statistica data, which also says Kenya is the 56 largest e-commerce market with a predicted revenue of $3.24 billion by 2023, placing it ahead of Jordan.

“Revenue is expected to show a compound annual growth rate of 6.7 per cent resulting in a projected market volume of $4.2 billion (Sh440.4b) by 2027,” Statisca says.

The introduction of the Lipa Mdogo Mdogo payment plan to enable safaricom’s customers upgrade their feature phones to 4G enabled smartphones, grantied further access to opportunities on the internet. Such deals helped to increase mobile money transfer, which the survey notes also increased by 15.1 per cent in 2022 to Sh7.9 trillion. Most Kenyans are increasingly preferring mobile money transfers.

Increased mobile penetration

This is also testament to growth in Mobile subscription penetration rates which rose to 143.1 per 100 inhabitants similar to mobile money subscriptions that increased to 84.1 per 100 inhabitants in 2022 for total population.

Overall, according to the survey, the ICT output value during the period under review grew by 7.7 per cent from Sh564.8 billion in 2021 to Sh608.1 billion in 2022.

Output value is described as the total value of sold or available for sale industrial products produced by an industrial enterprise in a certain period of time.

The survey indicates that total domestic telephone traffic declined from 80.1 billion minutes in 2021 to 78.3 billion minutes in 2022 while international telephone traffic grew from 1 billion minutes in 2021 to 1.1 million minutes in 2022. The number of domestic Short Message Services (SMSs) sent increased by 19.9 per cent to 51.2 billion while international SMSs sent and received declined by 29.2 per cent and 3.7 per cent, resulting in 19.8 million and 34.7 million, respectively.

The number of digital TV stations rose from 142 in 2021 to 192 in 2022, while online newspaper readers per day registered a 13.7 per cent growth to 4.7 million in 2022.