Smartphones assembled at the Safaricom factory in Athi River will be up to 30 percent cheaper than imported ones, the giant telco has revealed.

Chief Executive at Safaricom Peter Ndegwa said the discounted pricing will help the telco to encourage increased uptake of 4G-enabled phones in the country and help grow revenues from the data business.

“Our objective with local assembly is to hit price points that allow customers to afford those phones rather than start to make lots of money from assembling phones,” Mr Ndegwa said in a newly published transcript from a call to investors in November.

“Our expectation is not to make significant amounts of money on the actual device assembly, but to benefit customers downstream, and therefore increase our ability to monetise that through our existing business.”

The phone assembly plant known as East Africa Device Assembly Kenya Limited, started operations last October and runs as a joint venture between Safaricom, TeleOne and Jamii Telkom.

The plant can produce about three million devices per year, with room to increase depending on demand. Mr Ndegwa says the plant also targets to export into the East African region and extend production to other devices.

“Beyond producing 4G-enabled devices, we can also start to assemble other devices, like the CPUs (Central Processing Units) that are used at home and a variety of other devices. So this could be quite versatile in the future,” said Mr Ndegwa.

Safaricom mobile data revenue grew 10.6 percent to Sh53.6 billion in the year ended March 2023, being 18.2 percent of service revenue. The number of smartphones on the Safaricom network grew by 10 percent to 20.3 million during this period, with 13.22 million supporting 4G.