We have known for a while now that Telkom Kenya was dropping the Orange Kenya branding seeing that latter sold its 60-percent stake in Telkom Kenya to Helios Investment Group. Helios took over Telkom Kenya through their subsidiary, Jamhuri Holdings Limited.
Well, initial reports pointed to the rebrand happening in April, 2017 but that came and passed and we did not see anything, until June 4, 2017 when Orange Kenya started teasing “…a new move…into a bold new future” through their social media. The teasers point to the relaunch happening on June 6, 2017 and there’s a lot of use of the color blue as you can see in this Instagram post:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BU67D1ZhqgP/
And that is where our speculation starts, corporate colors. Telkom Kenya initially used the colors green and yellow, I don’t know how many of you can actually remember it but here’s a mind jog:
When Telkom Kenya got the “Orange Kenya” moniker, the logo and corporate colors changed to orange, black and grey perhaps to welcome the new owner:
Well, it is once again time for Change and this time it isn’t as easy as it was before since Helios is not a telco but an investment company and we can’t just assume that the company will now be known as Helios.
Looking at the color from the teaser, it is safe to assume that the new corporate color will be blue and from that we can maybe predict what branding the telco will be carrying henceforth by looking at key carriers that may be interested in the Kenyan market and feature a blue color of some sort:
- MTN – A South Africa-based multinational mobile telecommunications company, operating in many African, European and Asian countries. Its head office is in Johannesburg and it has operations in Kenya with MTN business offering business connectivity solutions.
- Celcom – A Malaysian telco with ties to Telkom Malaysia. Nothing much is known about this company but they do not have any operations in Africa, yet.
- AT&T – According to Wikipedia, AT&T is the world’s largest telecommunications company. It’s an American multinational telecommunications, headquartered at Whitacre Tower in downtown Dallas, Texas. This one is a stretch but it’s all in the blue.
- Telkom – This South-African telco operates in more than 38 African countries including Kenya and was until 2004 managed by AT&T. Telkom South Africa recently acquired a Kenyan ISP, Africa Online, so there’s the possibility of them being behind the blue we see.
- Ting – a very new mobile virtual network operator and internet service provider launched in February 2012 by Tucows Inc. It has operations in the US and Canada, non-outside these regions but who’s to say they can’t be the ones? It’s all in the blue.
- Tigo – Owned by South-African company Millicom, Tigo operates in more than fourteen countries in Africa and Latin America. Back in 2015, there was speculation that Tigo would enter the Kenyan market, those rumours never saw the light of day but who knows what the future holds?
The list of telco’s with blue branding on them is longer than this, we just looked at the ones with the highest possibilities. Keep in mind that there is no confirmation from Telkom Kenya on which brand name they will carry, all this are speculations so take it all with a pinch of salt.
Do not throw any stones in case none of the telcos above are unveiled as the new Telkom Kenya branding. We have a few hours until we can confirm the direction Telkom Kenya is taking, so just be patient.
In an unrelated news, about a year ago, we reported that Helios was planning on focusing aggressively on mobile money and if this tweet from Orange Kenya is anything to go by, we might just see a shift in the mobile money space in Kenya:
1/4Hello, Ceddy. Telkom Kenya is implementing a new and improved Mobile Money service. In order to facilitate this, we will be shutting down
— TelkomKenya_Care (@TelkomCare_Ke) June 3, 2017
[UPDATE] If you’re here now you probably know that Telkom is the new name
