An attempt by Airtel Kenya to get regulators to stop Safaricom’s low call prices has failed.
The Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) dismissed Airtel’s complaint about Safaricom’s Ofa Moto promotion, ruling that call rates as low as 10 cents per minute did not violate competition law, even though they were lower than the interconnection fees mobile operators pay each other.
As reported by Business Daily, the complaint centered on Kenya’s mobile termination rate. This is the fee one network pays another for calls landing on its lines, standing at KES 0.41 per minute.
Safaricom’s promotion offered calls at between KES 0.1 and KES 0.3 per minute, prices Airtel argued made no commercial sense unless the goal was to starve smaller rivals of customers and revenue.
Selling below cost long enough to push competitors out and then raise prices once the field clears is the textbook definition of predatory pricing. However, CAK sees it differently.
Its investigation found the promotion fell within a 90-day window permitted under the Kenya Information and Communications Act, after which operators must wait three months before running the same offer again.
Since Safaricom stayed inside that limit, the authority concluded the pricing did not harm competition and closed the file. In its own words, the promotion was:
“Restricted to a maximum of 90 days as provided under the Kenya Information and Communication Act and Regulations and could be repeated for at least three months to safeguard any negative impact on competition.”
The ruling matters beyond the two companies involved. It effectively confirms that as long as a discount campaign respects the 90-day rule, price alone will not trigger a predatory pricing finding, regardless of how far below the termination rate it sits.
For Airtel, that is an uncomfortable precedent. The company has long argued that Safaricom’s scale, still around 67% of subscribers as of December 2025, gives it room to absorb short-term losses that would sink a smaller operator.
Safaricom’s own numbers show its grip has loosened gradually, down from 72.6% in mid-2017, which helps explain why retaining subscribers through pricing remains central to its strategy.
Two regulators sit in this story, and it is worth being clear about who does what. The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) sets telecom-specific rules, including the guidelines on how long a promotion can run.
The Competition Authority of Kenya handles competition complaints across every sector of the economy, telecoms included.
Airtel took its case to the right body, but the outcome shows how a sector-specific rule, the 90-day promotion cap, can end up doing most of the work in a competition ruling.
There is a quieter fight running alongside this one. Airtel Money has, without any announcement, raised its fees for transfers to M-Pesa so that they now match Safaricom’s charges almost exactly.
A transfer of between KES 101 and KES 500 that previously cost KES 6 now costs KES 7, matching M-Pesa’s pricing. The same pattern appears across higher transaction bands.
Airtel’s website still shows the old rates, and the increase cannot be linked to new taxes because the proposed 16% VAT on peer-to-peer mobile money transfers was removed from the Finance Bill 2026.
Instead, the change appears to be a commercial decision to match the market leader’s pricing rather than continue offering lower rates.
Both episodes point to the same underlying tension. Kenya’s telecom market is dominated by one operator whose scale shapes what everyone else can charge, whether for calls or for moving money.
Regional plans for a One Africa Network, meant to harmonize roaming and data pricing across borders, depend on operators giving up exactly the kind of local pricing flexibility this dispute shows they are not ready to surrender.
