Kenya-Based Safaricom Will Halt Feature Phones Sales to Focus on Smart Phones

Safaricom, the Kenyan mobile service provider, will soon phase out sales of feature phones to concentrate on selling smart phones.

“Safaricom is soon going to stop selling the cheap feature phones in all our retail outlets, as we try to skew the Kenyan market towards smartphones," said Nzioka Waita, Safaricom director.

The move shows increased confidence that cheaper smart phones will change end user demand preferences. 

On a larger level, the move provides one more illustration of how fast advanced mobile technology mobile technology has changed the communications landscape globally, in just a few short years. 

Consider that as recently as 2008, some estimates had fixed broadband connections outnumbering mobile broadband by about a four to one margin.

In 2012, the ratio was reversed, and there were four mobile broadband connections in use for every fixed connection. That sort of change--that fast--does not happen in the communications business very often.

The number of mobile broadband subscribers around the world surpassed that of fixed broadband at the end of 2010, in appears. So mobile broadband went from a 20 percent of market state to a 50 percent of market state in just two years, by some estimates.

After about another three years, mobile broadband grew to represent 80 percent of all broadband connections, by some measures. That is a breathtaking change, in terms of the speed of the change.

By 2015, it is anticipated that there will be 3.1 billion mobile broadband subscribers compared to 848 million fixed broadband subscribers. Safaricom seems ready to prove that forecast is accurate.