Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you to the financial results announcement for Safaricom PLC for the full year 2022/2023. On behalf of the board of directors, the management team, and the staff of Safaricom, we'd like to thank you very much for joining us personally and those who are also joining us through the live stream. My name is Stephen Chege. I'll be your moderator for the day. I work as the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Safaricom. It's a pleasure to have you back in person. It's been a long COVID period when we've not been able to have this in person, so it is a pleasure for us as Safaricom to host some of you in the room. We still, of course, enjoy the pleasure of hosting those who are joining us through the live stream.
We're going to start with opening remarks from our Chairman, Mr. Adil Khawaja, Chairman of the Board of Directors. Thereafter, we'll have our Chief Executive Officer, Peter Ndegwa, give us his remarks, taking us through a business overview, talking about our purpose and strategy. Following that, our Chief Financial Officer, Dilip Pal, will take us through the financial performance and the results for the period under review, and I'm sure this is the red meat of why we are here today. Following the presentations, we will have a question and answer session for those in the room and also for those who are following us online. For those online, we'd like you to note that you can share your questions with us through the platform worldwideweb.slido.com. Ensure to use the code 2244209, which is reflected on your screens.
Should you wish to keep your social media followers updated, and we'd encourage you to do that, our hashtag today is hashtag Safaricom FY Results. In staying committed to our promise of diversity and inclusion, our sign language interpreters are Hilda Njeri Njeru, who's with us on stage, and she'll be assisted by Tobias Omondi in the course of the proceedings. It's now my pleasure to invite the Safaricom PLC Board Chairman, Mr. Adil Khawaja, to make his remarks. Welcome, Adil.
Good morning. A warm welcome to our shareholders, investors, investment managers, members of our board, colleagues at Safaricom, the media analysts, and those joining us online. Thank you, Stephen Kiptinness. It gives me great pleasure to stand before you as the Chairman of this incredible company for the announcement of the 2022/2023 results. I will start by thanking all the directors and the staff at Safaricom for the great welcome I received when I joined the board in January this year. As you know, early this year, there were changes to the board that saw me take over as Chairman. Two new directors, Ory Okolloh and Karen Kandie, joined our board. Like our other directors, they too have impeccable credentials. A huge welcome to them. The board has settled in well and assimilated the new members following a rigorous induction.
Our board is proud of its gender balance, its wide range of perspectives, experiences and skills, all of which enrich the decision-making process. This knowledgeable, experienced and inclusive board is very effective in carrying out its mandate, its oversight responsibilities, and providing guidance to the management. The board ensures that we deliver value to our stakeholders. The CEO and CFO, who you've already heard, will take you through the detailed performance of the company. Before they do, I would like to highlight a few key achievements. As Chair, I'm happy to report that the management, which I must tell you is excellent, is fully engaged and on track to deliver on our purpose to transform lives and our mission of becoming a purpose-led technology company by 2025. The board continues to support management in the execution of its business strategy and continues all the engagement with management.
Peter will shortly present, these achievements are due to placing our customers at the heart of our business and our firm commitment to our purpose. Safaricom recognizes that technology has the tremendous potential to unlock Kenya's economic growth, solve customer and societal issues, and deepen digital and financial inclusion. Safaricom will continue to take its place as a leader in this space. You all know, this past year, we faced significant headwinds, not only as a business, but as a country. Locally, we experienced a protracted electioning period, a slow transition to the new government, a significant domestic economic slowdown, rising inflation, currency depreciation, and a devastating drought and famine. During the same period, we have also seen significant economic slowdown globally. This too has an impact on our business. Our operating environment has also been affected by notable policy and regulatory changes.
Mobile termination rates were revised and an increase in excise duty, both on SIM cards and mobile phones was introduced. This has put further pressure on our performance. Despite these challenges, the management team has been able to deliver a good result. You will hear more from Peter and Dilip in this regard. Our board's commitment to governments and regulators. We are committed to making a difference by supporting the economy through job creation, meaningful partnerships, and remaining steadfast in paying taxes and duties to KRA. We intend to ramp up our engagement with the regulators on policy development, legislation, taxation, customer registration, and data protection. We are also working with the management to ensure that we collaborate better and more meaningfully with the various government agencies, both in Kenya and in Ethiopia.
To this end, focused on our goals, we will collaborate with the government towards projects and initiatives that seek to serve and transform the lives of Kenyans. The board is proud of the role Safaricom has played in projects thus far, such as the Hustler Fund, the Women Enterprise Fund, e-subsidies, delivery and distribution of fertilizer, and making more ICT services available to our customers. We have lined up a whole host of other innovative offerings, which we hope to roll out during the coming year. In February this year, the board approved the payment of an interim dividend of KES 0.58 dividend per ordinary share, amounting to over KES 23.24 billion for the shareholders of Safaricom. Across our borders, this past year, we launched our commercial operations in Ethiopia. This is a very exciting business with huge promise.
We will be rolling out new areas of business, growing our share of the voice and data business, and launching M-PESA. We are very optimistic about the opportunities Ethiopia presents for our business, and we intend to harness its full potential. As a board, we are committed to making the necessary financial investments. This financial year, we continue to be closer with the customer so as to unlock additional shareholder value. We aim to run and operate our business on the principle of being sustainable, driven by purpose of transforming lives by investments in healthcare, education, and economic empowerment through the two foundations we operate. I acknowledge the good work that both M-PESA and Safaricom Foundations have done over the years, and we look forward to creating even more impact as envisioned in the 2023, 2026 Safaricom Foundation strategy.
We will also continue engaging all stakeholders to ensure that our strategy, vision, and purpose reflect and meet the needs and expectations of the individuals, communities, and entities impacted by what we do. We are committed to making a difference by supporting economies of the countries we operate in through job creation, meaningful partnerships, and leading the way as an outstanding example of a responsible corporate citizen. During this period, Safaricom, through our CEO, led the private sector to partner with government to address and mitigate the drought and its effects across 23 of the most affected counties in Kenya. As you will recall, we did something similar during COVID. I'm well informed by Peter, who chairs the National Steering Committee on Drought Response, that there is a lot of work, planning, review of long-term sustainable solutions towards food security and the efficient drought management.
Safaricom will continue to partner on such activities. In conclusion, our continued success and resilience are due to the commitment of our employees who wake up every morning and bring the spirit of Safaricom alive every day, ably led by the management team and our board of directors. Thank you so much, Safaricom team members for your dedication and hard work. Without you, we will not be able to go forward. I'd like to make a specific mention for one staff who stands out this morning. Peter Gichangi, who works very closely with the board, had a bereavement last night. Despite that, he's here with a brave face and getting all of us ready. Thank you, Peter, and pole. My last parting words are Safaricom is Kenya, and Kenya is Safaricom. Peter will explain this to you later. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you very much, Adil, for those remarks. Again, our condolences to Peter for the bereavement earlier this morning. I now want to welcome our Chief Executive Officer, Peter, to come and take us through the operating environment, strategy, highlights for the year, and the Ethiopia update. Welcome, Peter.
Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me? The ones in the room. Thank you, Steve, and thank you, Chair, for the great comments. pole sana Peter. First of all, I wanted to make sure that my iPad works. That's why I'm buying a bit of time. You can't work for a tech company and not have and have some paperwork. I was saying to our CFO that, you know, when you're a CFO, you still have to have some backup. He has some paperwork with him, so I hope you won't bring them here, Dilip. Anyway, good morning, everyone. Our shareholders, representatives of the investor community, the board, management, and staff of Safaricom PLC, the media, members of the media, and the online community. Good morning
Good morning, those in the room.
Good morning.
Thank you very much. Safaricom is Kenya, and Kenya is Safaricom. Thank you all for joining us this morning for the full year financial results announcement. Before I go into my presentation, let me share with you some great news we've just received from across the border. As of this morning, Safaricom Telecommunications Ethiopia PLC... Go to the next slide. As of this morning, Safaricom Telecommunications Ethiopia has officially been granted the license to operate mobile money services. I know this has been a long journey, but great to see us being granted this license, and I can see our CEO from Safaricom Ethiopia is here today. Anwar, well done to you and the team for all the hard work in getting the license.
The National Bank of Ethiopia will be announcing formally at around 8:30 this morning to confirm that we have received the license, we do have the license in our hand, which is great. We look forward to launching M-PESA in the coming weeks and months. Let me now start our presentation with an overview of the operating environment, building on what the Chairman has said during this period. This year, we all experienced some tough headwinds, including high inflation, a depreciating Kenyan shilling, severe drought, and failed rainy seasons, among others. For our case, we also faced increased regulatory pressure, specifically the drop in mobile termination rates, which we call MTR. Our customers also had lower disposable income and are seeking more value and better experience in our products and services.
However, we benefited from a smooth political transition following the general elections. This stability, coupled with strong commercial execution, led to improved performance during the second half. Let us now look at how we've transformed lives during this period. Our purpose continues to guide us as we build a more sustainable business. We supported the country in dealing with the severe drought and once again demonstrated our commitment to this country, as the chairman has highlighted. We visibly led the private sector initiative, which is known as Pamoja Tuungane, as well as the National Steering Committee on Drought Response. We donated KES 350 million from Safaricom and our foundations. There are two foundations, Safaricom and M-PESA foundations, towards Wakenya Tulindane and Pamoja Tuungane campaigns.
We've also committed to donate a further KES 150 million to support the affected Kenyans as the impact of drought persists despite the current rains. As a result of our efforts and those of various partners, from across the board, both private and public, more than KES 1 billion have been raised towards these initiatives. Moving on to our focus on ESG. During this period, we achieved major milestones in our ESG commitments. As part of our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, our senior leadership is now composed of 40% women. As the Chairman has said, our board now has 45% women. Looks like the Chairman is beating the CEO in this respect.
3% of our workforce is composed of persons with living with disabilities, which is within our target, within sights of our target of 5% by 2025. We partnered with key industry stakeholders to develop the Industry Digital Talent Program. The program provides relevant work experiences for digital talent through upskilling and employment opportunities. Together with our industry partners, over 600 students have graduated with tech and digital-related courses. 78% of our suppliers are Kenyan-owned organizations, accounting for 63% of our procurement spend in the year under review. On environment, we've upgraded 23% of our BTS sites to solar, and it is our intention to eliminate the use of diesel in the medium term. These are not just targets to be met, but it's a show of commitment to prioritize people and the planet.
Let me now turn on to our focus and how we are executing our strategy. We are halfway through our 5-year journey towards being a purpose-led technology company. We have fully adopted agile ways of working and a digital customer-first mindset. Through data and analytics, we served our customers better, reduced pain points, and enhanced their experiences. Since we launched our strategy, we've achieved a number of elements. We've grown our GIGA customers, which is those who use more than 1 GB of data per month, by over 4.2 million customers. We launched our commercial operations in Ethiopia. We've grown our IoT, which is Internet of Things, and ICT business at an annual rate of 64% and 81% respectively. We've grown our fixed business, which is our home and an office business, attaining a market share of 46%.
On financial services, we've developed innovative products beyond payments and partnered with government to launch the Hustler Fund and the Women Enterprise Fund. As I have said, we've solarized 1,400 sites of our sites, thereby saving 22% energy costs from those sites alone. Ladies and gentlemen, let me now double-click on some of the key performance indicators for the year. In financial services, we are innovating beyond payments and consumer credit. During this period, we worked across industry to introduce merchant interoperability. Together we launched a national QR code which will ease payments. We recently launched a merchant credit proposition together with the Kenya Commercial Bank group. The facility will provide access to affordable credit, especially amongst small and micro businesses that have previously been locked out.
M-PESA Go for our children and the GlobalPay Virtual Card are some of the latest offerings that support the digital lifestyles of our customers. We were the first mobile network operator to launch 5G, which you have since rolled out to 23 counties. How did we drive value to help customers cope with the tough macroeconomic environment? Whilst we expanded our horizons, we gave customers more value through tailored offerings and consistent reduction in charges. Over 70% of our voice customers are on personalized pricing, such as Stori Ibambe. During this period, we reduced the cost of data by over 25% per MB. This has led to over 30% of mobile data customers consuming over 1 gigabyte of data monthly. We are the technology partner for government.
We have actively supported both the national and county governments to deploy solutions that benefit the public and contribute to societal progress. Thanks to our agile ways of working, we supported the government to roll out Hustler Fund in record time. This project took just seven weeks from ideation to launch. To give some numbers, over KES 24 billion has been disbursed to over 15 million Kenyans at the end of March 2023. We've also partnered in digitizing over 6,000 government services through eCitizen. We've been working with the government on eFertilizer, eSubsidy program, where farmers receive vouchers on their phones to redeem for subsidized fertilizer. We've also ventured into new business to drive digitization with platforms such as My County App for county governments.
As you have seen, we have accelerated new growth areas that go beyond our traditional businesses of connectivity and payments, including Internet of Things, ICT, and cloud. In the year under review, our consumer and business M-PESA Super App generated over KES 7.4 billion. We added over 2.3 million 4G devices to our network and laid over 14,000 kilometers of fiber. We prioritized cybersecurity solutions and data privacy to protect our customers' information and maintain their trust. Ladies and gentlemen, looking at how we are responding to the growing macroeconomic challenges within our business. The business is delivering more value to our customers. We have reduced our charges for M-PESA and mobile data significantly in the past year, in the past couple of years.
Specifically on mobile data, we've reduced costs by up to 75% per megabyte over the past 3 years. We are investing heavily in IoT and ICT whilst remaining ahead of potential risks and emerging issues to ensure we consistently deliver value to our shareholders. Moving across to the border, or rather, moving across the border to Ethiopia. Ethiopia opportunity cannot be understated. We are encouraged by the peaceful environment witnessed in the Tigray region and the return to commercial and economic activities. The liberalization of key industries by the government of Ethiopia is a positive move that will open Ethiopians to reap opportunities. We are also working closely with the regulators to manage some of the recurrent issues that have come up during our first few months of operations.
In the 7 months that we've been running our commercial operations in Ethiopia, we built a reliable network now available in 22 cities and regions across Ethiopia. This is an award-winning premium quality network with close to 1,300 network sites, of which we built just over 895 sites. We closed the year with close to 3 million customers in terms of gross adds, those that is customers we added onto our network, and over 2.1 million 90-day active customers. We have over 114 distributor shops, and we have over 900 staff, of which 80% are Ethiopians. Our ecosystem in Ethiopia has created, over 4,600 indirect jobs. Ladies and gentlemen, the potential for Ethiopia is immense.
Some of the lessons from the Ethiopia business include the need to accelerate network rollout to meet demand, which exists. We've also noted low smartphone penetration, which is both a challenge but also a great opportunity for our business. The government of Ethiopia has supported us in legislating and fast-tracking some of its plans, including telecommunication reform program, prioritizing investment incentives, which will aid in managing issues such as customs clearance. These programs and incentives will lead to, among others, increased access to affordable 4G devices in the country and an increased customer base. Finally, ladies and gentlemen, we are very proud today, we have obtained the M-PESA license to operate mobile money services in Ethiopia, which is an area that we understand and know very well, which positions us to provide essential financial services to the Ethiopian population.
We are now getting ready to launch M-PESA brand in Ethiopia over the coming weeks and months. Let me now get into the real heart. Let us look at our performance for the full year ended March 2023. Our overall F23, financial year 23 performance is in line with the guidance we shared back in November with all investors. Safaricom Kenya recorded KES 116.3 billion in EBIT, against a guidance range of KES 112 billion-KES 115 billion, therefore outperforming the guidance. At KES 40.4 billion, our CapEx is within our guidance range.
On a consolidated basis, incorporating start-up costs and investments in Safaricom Ethiopia, which is fundamental for us to build a credible business in Ethiopia, the group closed at an earnings before interest and taxes of KES 91.7 billion, in line with our guidance of KES 87 billion-KES 93 billion. Capital expenditure for Ethiopia business came in lower than guidance due to a late start-up and slowdown in site rollout, closing at KES 4 billion lower than our guidance. Our overall capital expenditure for the group therefore stood at KES 96.1 billion, which is slightly lower than our guidance. Having faced such macroeconomic headwinds and a very tough operating environment, we are proud that we have been able to deliver solid growth in the year.
The bottom line reflects our investment to secure our future, Ethiopia being at the core of what will support our growth for Safaricom in the medium to long term. Let me now hand over to Dilip to take us through the performance in greater detail. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Good morning. Hamjambo. Peter, sorry about your loss. Great news this morning with Peter announcing the arrival of license, the long-awaited digital financial services license in Ethiopia. Two reactions from my side. One, excited for the great opportunity. Second, one less question to be answered.
It gives me great pleasure to take you through our financial performance for the year ended 31st of March, 2023. As Chair and Peter said, we are delighted to have resumed the in-person release of our earnings. For those tuning in online, we appreciate you as well. Before I start, I would like to inform you that the result materials will be available at our website right after this session. Now, let me delve details into the numbers.
Starting with how our service revenue evolved in the last financial year. Before I talk about the top-line numbers, you heard Chair talking about our operating environment, macroeconomic challenges. Peter has spoken about that. We had huge pressure, inflationary pressure on our consumer spending. We have seen slowdown in business during electioneering period, before election, during election, even after election. Energy cost significantly increased due to tariff reviews and also subsidy removal. Increase in excise duty on SIM cards and also mobile phones impacted our device sales during the year. The subscriber registration process, which had a deadline, and we had to comply, also resulted into approximately 1.6 million subscribers who couldn't comply within the date.
Most importantly, mobile termination rate, mobile termination rate change that came into effect from 1st of August, impacting our top-line revenue to the tune of KES 2 billion. This actually translates to KES 3 billion top-line hit on an annualized basis. That said, however, we also had some opportunities, which included the return to charging of wallet to bank and bank to wallet from 1st of January. Also, we have witnessed a recovery in business activity in the second half of the year, following the peaceful transition of the government. We therefore record an improved performance in the second half of the year compared to the first half. Service revenue grew 6.5% in the second half compared to 5% in the first half when adjusted to MTR.
For the full year, service revenue grew by 5% and 5.7% when adjusted for the MTR impact. If you look at the different product lines in the chart, we have recorded growth across most revenue lines, and the chart on the left demonstrates that the major drivers of growth has been mobile data, M-PESA, and fixed revenue. Moving across to the charts on the right, you can see that M-PESA now contributes to close to 40% of the service revenue, up from 38% last year. Let me start with M-PESA. M-PESA continues to be a key player in the payment ecosystem, driving financial inclusion in our country. Whilst we had a slowdown in business activity from the macroeconomic effects and also worsening business sentiment during the election period, we saw increased momentum in half 2.
With the return to charging for bank to wallet and wallet to bank in Q4, we were able to record a double-digit growth of 12.2% year-over-year in quarter four of the last financial year in M-PESA. As you can see on the chart on the left, M-PESA grew overall for the financial year by 8.8%. Personal payments, which includes transfers to individuals, grew by 8%, driven by organic customer growth. Business payments, which include C2B, B2C, Lipa M-PESA and B2B, saw a growth of 17.3% attributable to aggressive merchant acquisition and return to charging. We almost added 23% to our merchant base to close more than 600,000 at the end of the financial year.
Global payments continued to perform extremely well, growing 15% year-over-year, enabled by growth in remittances. Looking at M-PESA usage, velocity in the ecosystem continued to grow with total value and the volume of M-PESA transactions growing 21.4% and 33.5% year-over-year respectively. You would recall volume and values have been on a continuous growth for the last three years. We had 21 billion transactions valued at KES 36 trillion channeled through the M-PESA platform in the year under review. The left chart speaks to chargeable transactions per one-month active customer, which is a very important variables to see the health of the business grew 16% year-over-year. We are now about, at the end of H2, we're about close to 25 transactions per customer per month.
Not too long ago, pre-COVID, transactions, average transactions per customer per month was hovering around 9-10. Pre-COVID, and now we are at a level of 25. We continue to invest and drive innovation of new products as we increase our service offerings to our customers. Another area of our excitement is the two Super Apps that we have launched. Consumer Super App and the Business Super App. These are still early days, but as you can see from the chart, we had 7.4 million downloads. We have embedded now 61 Mini Apps in our Consumer Super App. We have about 1.2 million monthly active customers, monthly active revenue-generating customers, who generated KES 6.7 billion of M-PESA revenue. It's almost 6% of the total M-PESA revenue in a very short period of time.
The value of the transactions, which was transacted through this consumer platform was KES 1.3 trillion. With 34 transactions per customer per month in Consumer Super App, the engagement level is 50% better than the average for the outside of Super App customers. We are about 20-22.5 in the overall, and Super App is about 34 transactions per customer per month. On the right side, you see the Business Super App performance. We have about 500,000 downloads. The active merchants are about 251,000, and we have generated about KES 658 million of revenue over the period. As always, we provide a lot more details in our results booklet about M-PESA, which will be available in our website shortly.
Moving to mobile data, which has remained one of our key growth drivers over many years now. Mobile data revenue grew double digit to 10.6%, mostly driven by increased usage. Usage by chargeable customers grew by 54% to close at 3.6 gigabits in the period. We also got supported by increased ARPU. Mobile data ARPU grew by 16%. Driven by 15% growth in customers using more than 1 gigabytes per customer per month. Our customer value management propositions and also the big data analytics have significantly enhanced targeted customer offerings. As Peter mentioned, our rate per megabits has declined by 24.5% to KES 0.067, driving affordability for our customers.
As we focus on growing penetration of 4G devices, we are delighted to see that of the smartphone users that grew by 10% to 20.3 million to end the year, 65% or 13.2 million are active 4G devices. We continue to support customers to purchase 4G-enabled devices through our Lipa Mdogo Mdogo propositions, which has enabled over 1 million customers to enjoy more features at their convenience. Ladies and gentlemen, moving on to fixed services, which is another growth area for us. Although in terms of revenue contribution it's still small, but this is one area we're investing, and we are seeing the growth, as you can see from the chart. Overall, fixed revenue grew by over 20%. Fiber to home revenue grew by 21.4%, and fiber to business grew by 18%.
We have also seen the fiber to home customers growing by 18% the year to close at 196,000. We also acknowledge that there is still a lot of untapped opportunity in this area as we are marching towards connecting 1 million home by the end of our strategy period. Now, the traditional business, which is to be the voice and messaging, as you have seen before in our presentation, in our results release, this revenue stream is under pressure and has remained under pressure for a long time. What we managed to reverse the trend in the last financial year is on messaging. Fortunately, we are not in that level of maturity where people almost are not using messaging service.
In Kenya, we see still a traction if we're able to provide good propositions, which you have done in the last financial year. The messaging revenue in H2 actually grew by 18.9%, leading to a full year growth of 4.9%, which has not happened in the last five years. It's a welcome change from a messaging revenue point of view. Voice revenue, on the other hand, recorded a decline. We always spoken about a low single digit decline is expected in voice. Between H1 and H2, we have seen performance improvement in H2. H1 voice revenue declined by 3.8%, compared to a 1.7% decline in H2.
As we have said before, in the long run, these two revenue lines may follow a similar trend that you may have seen in the mature market, but we are not there yet. We are very much committed to make sure that we maintain our market share and defend. We have consistently been optimizing our pricing over the years to ensure that we drive affordability and usage. Our voice rate per minute closed at finishing 1.33, a drop of 16.9% year-over-year. This has been very well received by our customers amidst the tough macro environment with the rising inflation. It also goes to cement our commitment to supporting our customers during this difficult period to still enjoy the user products, as Peter mentioned. We have been updating you on some of the newer areas of growth drivers.
On a small base, as you can see, I think Peter mentioned about it. You see on the left side are the revenue, on the right side are the customers. Our cloud and ICT revenue actually doubled in this financial year. The number is still small. It doubled to KES 1.1 billion. We have been seeing a growth trajectory in this area. Our IoT business, which majorly serves our enterprise customers, grew revenue by 61%, mostly driven by new connections. We have closed our IoT subscribers at 1.5 million. Content revenue, still early days, grew 48.8% with customers growing 50% now to close at 2 million mark.
While I've spoken about M-PESA overall, in some areas that we have launched recently, for example, Pochi La Biashara, which is wallet for micro or small businesses, business transacting tools, merchant credit facilities, we actually have seen a growth of 58% year-over-year to close at KES 1.5 billion. We are committed to continue providing our customers with the best deals and solutions as we become a one-stop shop in serving our SME, MSME and large corporate segments of the country. Let's now switch gears to Ethiopia performance. I'm sure there is a lot of anticipation of what we are providing additionally more than what we have done before. I can confirm you, it's not gonna be red meat. It's gonna be lean meat, easy to digest.
As promised during our engagements in the year, we are committed to sharing more information on the financial performance metrics of Safaricom Ethiopia start up as the business takes shape. As Peter mentioned, we have continued to record great milestones with our business in Ethiopia, having launched commercial operations, and with 22 cities currently live on our network. We have seen very, very encouraging uptake from our customers, both in terms of numbers and usage. As I take you through the numbers, just remember, these are still early days, so I won't recommend that you start updating your models that these are the numbers. These are probably early signs that you can start thinking about getting a feel of how the business is moving. As you would recall, we updated in our half-yearly results release, the what you call introductory offer.
It came with a welcome offer of data, voice, and SMS for customers to test and experience. For the seven months that we have been in operation, our 90-day active customers stood at 2 million, and 93% of the 90-day active, actually, the customers that we acquired are active. The 90-day active data customers closed at 1.4 million, 73% of the active voice customers. This is a very important number for you to note. As Peter mentioned, we are building a great quality network, a great quality 4G network, and customers are actually liking it. In seven months, 70% of voice customers using mobile data is a very, very important milestone. We have also seen a significant usage of data at 1.5 GB per customer per month for the first seven months.
Just to give you a comparison, 2 years back, Kenya, after launch of mobile data, probably after 10 or 7-8 years, we are about 1.5 GB. That's where we haven't finished even 1 year. The average consumption per customer per month is 1.5 GB. Voice usage stands at an average of 54.5 minutes and 10.8 SMS per customer per month. Moving on to revenue and ARPU. I know there has been a lot of expectation around that we provide more information on ARPU, but as I said, please take this as these are all start-up initial numbers. We generate about total of KES 1.8 billion revenue, out of which about KES 500 billion revenue is service revenue. What is satisfying for us is 60% of service revenue is from mobile data.
Just to give you have seen the chart when I presented the contribution of revenue. We are about 17%-18% in Kenya. Ethiopia started very well on contribution of mobile data. That said, it doesn't mean that the numbers are sustainable at that level. Remember, voice contribution is still low at a lower usage per customer per month, but it's still very, very satisfying. Our network has gained mileage as being reliable and stable, and that has been the key proposition to our customers. Just to share with you, in the last quarter we have seen a bit of slowdown in our mobile data usage because of social media restrictions. Just to confirm that we are consolidating Ethiopia numbers in the consolidated numbers that I'm going to present later on.
I would just like to again give you a little bit of alert, not try to read too much of this on hyperinflationary accounting. Those of you who are following this continent's listed companies probably are aware of what's the meaning of hyperinflationary accounting, which is governed by IAS 29. For us it's new because Ethiopia has now been declared by International Accounting Standard under hyperinflationary economy. Basically, which means that in three years cumulative inflation, it crosses 100%, you have to adjust your financial statement based on IAS 29. A bit technical, but I won't dwell a lot on this. Basically, monetary assets and monetary liabilities cannot be kept in the financial books at the historical value. You have to restate adjusting with the consumer price index.
We have done all of that, but because of our monetary liabilities are higher than the monetary assets, we have seen a gain in our financial statement at a net level of KES 3.5 billion. I'll leave you with that and not, you know, speak a lot about this, but there are more details available in the results booklet which we have, which we'll be sharing very shortly. Moving on to the outlook for Ethiopia and our commitment. From a funding side, let me first start with the CapEx. I think our CapEx investment projection stands between KES 1.5 billion-KES 2 billion in the first 5 years. That remains. Our site rollout, which we have closed financial year at about 1,300 sites. We are talking about 10,000-12,000 sites by year 10.
We target to break even by year four at a EBITDA level. We have put in from Safaricom at the end of financial year $690 million as a equity contribution out of $1.23 billion contribution for the consortium as a whole. We continue to explore and assess optimal funding as we have extended, we have facilities from vendor financing through vendors and also local facilities from the banks. The local facilities are short-term in nature. We are also in final stages of discussion with IFC to partner at both equity and also debt. As I said, discussion is still ongoing. I would like to highlight and reiterate what I said before.
Even if IFC comes in as an equity investor, we'll continue to hold majority and will be able to consolidate Ethiopia in our financials. As the key partners of the consortium, we are always committed to ensure that the business is well-resourced and funded to carry out its operations. Let me take you through the group net income. This waterfall chart gives you a bit of a overview how to read the numbers. As you can see, FY 2023, Kenya reported a 3% growth in net income. We have informed you before that there is a loan that we have taken in Kenya to support investment in Ethiopia during the licensing period, and there is an additional interest cost. If you normalize that, Kenya reported a 5.5% net income growth.
If I move to on the right side, normalizing the hyperinflationary accounting impact and also normalizing the minority interest, the numbers to look at for Kenya is 10.6%. A group number to look at the group is, including Ethiopia, is a 10.6% decline in net income. Headline, 3% growth in net income. Adjusted to interest for Ethiopia loan, Ethiopia financing, 5.5% growth. Adjusted to Ethiopia minority interest, the decline of 10.6%. I won't spend a lot of time on this slide. Just to give you an overview of the Kenya performance and the Ethiopia performance in more detail. Just to highlight here again that mobile termination rate change impacted our top line by KES 2 billion. Operating costs grew by 7%. I mentioned about energy cost.
Of course, beyond energy cost, you have also seen losses coming from currency depreciation. Safaricom reported, as I said, KES 1.8 billion of total revenue. Because of the startup cost, Safaricom reported a KES 22 billion loss in the financial year. As I said before, the group income overall that you see these numbers, these are very much within our expectation, as also Peter mentioned, very much within our guidance. I mean, just to give you a little bit of long-term view how our performance has been. As you can see, our performance indicators remain very strong and have been stable over the years. The productivity initiative that Peter spoke about have helped us to cushion the growth on the cost side by delivering stable contribution margin. EBITDA margin FY23 closed at 52%.
We are even better than pre-COVID period. OpEx intensity is one of the best in the market at around 17.3%, which demonstrates our focus on productivity. Return on capital employed is very healthy, which gives us enough opportunity for investment. Net debt to EBITDA is at 0.35. As those of you who are following telcos, you know we are one of the best in this segment. On CapEx. We have invested heavily last year. This is one of the highest CapEx investment, closing over KES 40 billion for Kenya. Ethiopia about KES 55 billion, to close the numbers for the group, KES 96 billion. The group capital expenditure is therefore at KES 96.1 billion, as Peter said, very much within the guidance.
The Ethiopia spend was mostly supporting the 1,272 sites that you have seen, that we have rolled out, and also the infrastructure required to launch, and therefore expand the coverage. Ethiopia now has, as I said, 1,272 sites and also 379 sites under construction. Lastly, in line with our purpose of transforming lives, we are committed to continue creating value for our shareholders and investors. The dividend yield at 6.6% is the highest recorded over the last 5 years. The earning per share at KES 1.55 has been impacted by consolidation of Ethiopia startup cost. Chairman mentioned about it. The board approved payment of interim dividend, which was KES 0.58 shilling, amounting to KES 23.24 billion.
Board has recommended to the shareholders of the company, which will be approved in the forthcoming AGM, a final dividend of KES 0.62 per ordinary share. This will lead to a total dividend payout of KES 1.20 per share and total amount of KES 48 billion for the full year. This is in line with our dividend policy, which has been consistent over the years at 80% of our group net income, excluding minority interest. We remain committed to paying dividends that are commensurate with our performance. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time. Just to mention again that the result materials will be available on our website shortly. Back to you, Peter, for FY 24 guidance and concluding remarks. Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, Dilip. I know that you said one last question on Ethiopia. I'm sure there have been many more now on about the rollout of mobile financial services, which is a fantastic place to be. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We've delivered a solid set of results. The business is stable and on a positive momentum since the beginning of H2. In the financial year 2023, 2024, our focus will be on scaling technology solutions that will allow us to fully transform into a tech organization, which is our vision for 2025. We are also starting now to think about the next horizon in terms of our strategy for 2030.
I mean, by the time we announce our second half, or rather first half results, we'll start to give you some texture on that. What are we going to focus on for financial year 2024? We'll continue to expand our footprint in fixed business, especially our home business, in 5G now that we have launched the initial base stations that are supporting both fixed wireless but also mobile. We will also focus on digital services and smartphone penetration. Smartphone penetration is going to be a critical enabler of our ability to connect everyone to the internet, to enable everyone to access digitized services, and also to enable our business to be a fully tech business.
We'll enhance our financial services with propositions in wealth and insurance. This is the year that we'll start to see that come alive. In the past, it has been primarily at innovation stage. We'll accelerate our enterprise propositions, where there's a huge opportunity using ICT and Internet of Things. As you've seen, we've set up off a low base, but there's significant opportunity both for medium, for small, medium-sized businesses, but also for large corp and government. We'll support and continue to accelerate the digitization and ICT agenda for both national and county government.
We want to be seen as the technology provider for government, both at a national and also at a local county level, because by enabling that to happen, our customers become more digitized, live better lives, and we're able to support their ability to live better lives and transform their lives. Then we'll continue internally to work on faster deployment of solutions as we mature our agile ways of working. Agile is very important because it allows us to reduce speed to market, but also ensures that we work in a collaborative way to co-create solutions that work for customers, but also society.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will continue to combine the power of innovation or the power of technology and innovation to grow beyond our connectivity and our payment business, which has been the primary way of converting into a purpose-led technology company. Let me go into the guidance for the next year. Our financial year 2024 guidance is based on continuing prevailing macroeconomic and regulatory conditions that have impacted our current financial year, because those are unlikely to change, at least not in the near term. Safaricom Kenya EBIT will continue to be stable and forecasted to be within the range of KES 117 billion-KES 120 billion, and our CapEx again growing but generally stable at KES 42 billion-KES 45 billion.
The increase is primarily to support new growth areas, 5G, fixed, and also maintain existing business. Ethiopia, on the other hand, and in line with our targets, shared by Dilip, is forecast to record its highest startup cost in terms of horizon over the next few years. We anticipated that when we did our original business case for Ethiopia in anticipation of being to delivering breakeven by year 4. We are keen to accelerate our operations in Ethiopia. We are not going to hold back investment, and we will intend to reach 10 million customers by the end of the financial year, F-23/F-24.
In terms of base stations, our capital expenditure is going to be within the range of KES 40 billion-KES 45 billion, which is at approximately the same level that we are investing in Kenya. It shows you the level of ambition there to get to 3,000 sites by the end of financial year 2024. Just to put it in perspective, Kenya has just over 6,000 sites. That would be just about half, getting to where half of where Kenya is, and that will give us quite a bit of scale in our ability to get what is called contiguous coverage for our customers and be able to overlay all the solutions, including mobile financial services.
EBIT guidance, therefore, for Ethiopia, given all those start-up costs, will be a loss range of between KES 42 billion and KES 39 billion, reflecting the start-up costs. In total, our overall group guidance therefore stands at an EBIT range of KES 75 billion-KES 81 billion, and CapEx, or capital expenditure, of KES 82 billion-KES 90 billion. That will set us up to see growth beyond that and get to breakeven, as Dilip has said, from year 4 onwards, and also become a real fuel for growth for the group in terms of both top and bottom line beyond that.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, looking into the future, we believe that our business is well positioned to support our customers and to provide technology solutions as we march firmly into a purpose-led technology organization. I'd like to thank our Chairman, Adil, the board, some of whom are in the room, for the support accorded to myself and my leadership team. To Safaricom, to Safaricom staff, thank you for the hard work that you have put in during a tough operating period. As our Chairman said, the magic happens because of what our people bring and do every day. To all our stakeholders, and we have many, from suppliers, dealers, agents, shareholders, the government, and the public, I thank you for your confidence in Safaricom. As Chairman said, Safaricom is Kenya, and Kenya is Safaricom.
We are excited about the possibilities and the opportunities that lie ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us physically here, today, and also for those joining us online. I thank you for your time. Asante Sana.
I expected a better clap. Thank you very much. I invite Steve back to the stage. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Adil, Chairman. Thank you, Peter, and thank you, Dilip. Thank you for clarifying that the meat is lean. We do not want our guests to have indigestion, so that's much appreciated. We'll now move to a question and answer session for our investors and for the media. Again, if you are joining us virtually, I'll encourage you to ensure that you put in your questions as soon as possible on the worldwideweb.slido.com using the code 2244209. The Slido code is on the screen. There will be roving mics for those of us in the room for the questions. I'll ask you to raise your hand. Do let us know the organization you represent, your name. Thereafter, you can proceed to ask your question.
We're going to begin the question and answer session shortly. Before we do that, I'd like us to just watch the following video. Thank you.
Safaricom Chapa Dimba is back, bigger, bolder, and better. Register your team. Visit chapadimba.safaricom.co.ke, and you too can be the next football star. Cheza kama wewe.
That was a short video that showcases one of our brand assets. In fact, our very key brand assets, Safaricom Chapa Dimba. Those of you who have followed Safaricom over the years know that we are back bigger, better, louder with Safaricom Chapa Dimba. This is a grassroots football tournament that aims to give talented young boys and girls a chance to showcase their full potential. This aims to give them exposure, and this is going to happen countrywide in all the counties, in all the sub-counties of our counties in this country. We're excited that this is back after a three-year hiatus. Again, that was occasioned by the unfortunate COVID situation.
We would like to encourage all interested teams to register. This needs to happen by or before the end of this month to ensure that your team is registered to play. We have some extremely exciting prizes. We are focusing even more on promoting and giving recognition and visibility to the lady teams as well. This is in keeping with Safaricom's move towards and highlighting diversity. Having said that, I'd now like to move us to our Q&A session. I'd like to call on the stage our Chairman, Adil, our Chief Executive, Peter, our Chief Financial Officer, Dilip. To assist me in moderating this session is my colleague, Chris Karanja, who looks good in a suit, but he rarely wears.
Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Do you want me to go through the Slido questions, and then you can take the questions from the floor?
Sure.
Right. I think that we have a couple of questions coming in. The first one is on the amount of the license fee. What is the license fee for the mobile financial services in Ethiopia? Allow me to read at least 3 questions, you can take them as groups. 2 questions around cybersecurity and security and safety of M-PESA. First one is, have you had any significant provisions for cybersecurity breaches? I repeat, have you had any significant provisions for cybersecurity breaches? The next one is on M-PESA. The M-PESA password is usually shown in plain text. That's a security risk that has been raised several times. When will you fix it? The M-PESA password is usually shown in plain text. That's a security risk that has been raised several times. When will you fix it?
those are the first two questions. We have another about five questions on Slido, Stephen.
Perhaps I could add another three questions, if you're okay, from the floor. Those of us who are in the room, if you could put up your hand and the mic will come to you. I cannot see any question from the floor. There's one question right in front of me.
Hi there. Nigel Littlewood from Australia. Are there any medium-term plans to introduce a digital SIM into your business and replace the plastic ones?
Thank you. Was the organization called Australia or was that the country? Very well. Thank you. Any other question from the floor? Okay, I suggest we can go with those four, and then we can move to the next round of questions led by Chris. Over to you.
Thank you, Steve. I think the first. Actually, all the questions can be answered by Peter. I'll ask him to answer them. Then I'll ask Dilip to add, because all of them are, you know, about money, how much have we invested on the license, cybersecurity, what we have done in relation to that, password on M-PESA. Maybe I'll add one more thing, disclosing the number every time you have a confirmation, which seems to have become an issue among people. We're going to work around that and whether we had moved to the eSIM.
Thank you, Chair. I see that the people in the room are a bit shy compared to the ones online. The license fee, this is why I was saying to Dilip that the questions on M-PESA or Ethiopia are not going to stop. The first question on the license fee. We have paid $115 million. Sorry, $150 million to be able to acquire the license. We always considered this as part of one license, a one-off license. It doesn't require us to pay any other license going forward.
We are going to be regulated in the same way that we are regulated in Kenya, in terms of a payment instrument issuer, as... I know that the National Bank of Ethiopia is already preparing for issuing the detailed prudential guidelines about how we operate. Based on what we have seen, they are largely similar to the other markets where mobile money is operating. That's on the license fee. In terms of cybersecurity, as you will have seen or have heard during my presentation, cyber is one of the biggest areas of focus from a risk perspective. Beyond macroeconomic and regulatory risk, cyber is a significant area of focus for us because we are a technology company.
We are connecting people every day. We are providing financial services on a daily basis. Actually, we do have one of the best cyber defense as an organization and in the industry, we are considered very strong. We lost a lot of people from our cyber team to other organizations, which is an indication that actually they see us as leading the way. We also benchmark ourselves against both the Vodafone Group and other institutions in which we operate in, and we're largely top tier in many respects. We keep pushing the boundaries because we know that we are in two industries. We're in a connectivity business, but also in financial services.
Nicholas Mulila, who leads the risk area, this is one of the major areas of focus. On the M-PESA password, yes, there are plans to make sure that we continue to improve the security, both in the way that customers feel that they are safe, but also in the experience that they have. It is something that will come down the line, including what the Chairman has said in terms of ensuring that you cannot see the number when you actually transact with your line. That is underway. On introducing eSIMs, I talked about also us thinking about the next phase of our strategy. That is certainly one of the areas that we are focusing on.
We are learning from also what is going on in the rest of the world. We'll continue to take the best practice. Certainly that's an area we are looking at. I'm happy for Dilip, if you can, to add anything, especially on some of the risk areas.
No, nothing more to add. Thank you, Peter. Nothing more to add. Just to say that, especially on the password side, there has been a lot of work ongoing, and hopefully we'll see some announcement on this, this year. A lot of effort has gone into this to make sure that the customer privacy is the prime importance for us. We take that very, very seriously. Thank you.
All right. I think we can go to the next round of questions.
All right. Dilip, one for you to think about as I ask a couple of questions. What are the consolidated EBITDA margins? Peter, on tech solutions, a couple of questions here, I'll try and summarize some. Around DigiFarm. On a specific question on DigiFarm. Yes. How is DigiFarm positioned to scale technology solutions? I've seen another one with focus on public sector projects. What is being done to support the government? I think you can take those two. EBITDA for Dilip.
Let's just do two more questions or three more questions from the floor. You could put up your hand. Yes, go ahead. Your name, organization, and the question.
Yes. Good morning, everyone. I'm Tim Stamos. I manage African Alliance Fund, which is an existing shareholder in Safaricom. Nigel from Australia is one of my investors, so we're very happy to be here in Kenya today. A couple of questions. You mentioned the $150 million license fee in Ethiopia. Just wanted to ask Dilip, how are you gonna account for that in terms of the period over which it's amortized? I also have a question regarding the balance sheet structure. While as shareholders we're very appreciative of the dividend, and I'm sure the Kenyan government and Vodafone are as well, you are leveraging up for the CapEx expansion in Ethiopia.
I'm wondering, firstly, whether there's any, you know, dividend payout ratio changes on the horizon, and also whether there are any moves afoot to perhaps sell off towers or things like that, to change the balance sheet shape and get some capital in the door that way.
Thank you. There's another question on the right side. All right, yeah, go ahead.
Good morning, board and Safaricom as a whole. Just this goes out to Peter. My name is Nyambura Koigi. Good morning, everyone. We pointed out the challenges during the previous, you know, financial year, whether it's through elections, with the change of regime, the droughts, the consistent inflation rate going up. How exactly does Safaricom actually make a profit consistently? Because, I mean, these are changes that we have seen that really do affect not only Safaricom as a corporate, but, you know, the day-to-day Safaricom user. Thank you.
Thank you for that interesting question. Last question from the floor. Yes, there's one to my left.
Hi, my name's Joshua King. It's just to better understand the true potential of revenue growth, because the M-PESA revenue, which is like a third of your revenue basket, is open to disruption on the tech front. Obviously the existing revenue drivers that you mentioned, such as IoT and adjacent categories, like they're not big enough to replace some of the other areas that are wide open for disruption. I wanna understand like from a revenue growth perspective long term, like where the bulk of that balance will come from.
Thank you. I think that might be a question for you, Peter, or possibly Dilip. We could go to the answers and then do another round of questions. Can I start with you? You want to start, Dilip? Okay. I'll start with the first one, which is consolidated EBITDA margin at a group level. It's 45%. The question on the $150 million, the DFS fee, the mobile license, mobile financial service license fee that we paid, it will be amortized over the license period, which is 15 years. There was a question on the leverage and the dividend policy. No, we don't have any plan to change the dividend policy. I think I did mention about leverage at 0.35.
We're all used to, we used to see a negative number or zero number for net debt to EBITDA over a long period of time, ever since we started Ethiopia. Remember, leverage is good as long as the investment is going to give you the returns. I think that kind of justifies the leverage that we have. I think we do have opportunities even leveraging higher, provided that we have good investment, you know, scopes. I think we are, we are in very, very safe space as far as 0.35 net debt to EBITDA is concerned. There is question, I don't know, I'll start and Peter. My question to you, back to you is that, are you concerned about that Safaricom makes profit?
I mean, I don't know what tone I should take in terms of responding to you. What exactly was the intention? That, is it like, how does Safaricom make profit? I mean, I think, I'm not assuming what your real intention is, but just to say that we have shareholders who have, you know, we have a board and we have management to deliver certain outcomes of a commercial organization that we run. I'm sure you understand that, income statement and balance sheet, and cash flow are very important part of what the deliverables, finally what you come here in to see. It's not, it's not…
I mean, if your question is that why the profit level has slowed down, I think that I think is a better question because of the cost increase. I have shown the cost has gone up by 7%. Our top line, headline top line growth without an MTR adjustment was 5%. You can imagine 5% growth on top line and 7% growth on operating costs of course leaves you with a lower profit, right? Those cost increase was coming from, mostly from inflation-related and the currency depreciation macro impact. Also the customer challenge that Peter spoke about that the wallet is under pressure. It's been a very, very tough year from that point of view, managing costs. Energy cost has gone up.
We had a hit of almost close to KES 1 billion from that. It's been a tough year. Within that tough year, we are considering that a solid performance. Of course, Ethiopia is a start-up cost, as you have seen, that will continue to make start-up losses. The peak loss year would be next year, which is FY 2024. Or the current year, which is, we are in May now. Yeah, that's how I will, I want to leave that answer with. On the revenue growth drivers, I think the question is a very good question on how would Safaricom create a sustainable revenue momentum? Just to correct you, it's not 1/3. As I mentioned, M-PESA now contributes 40% of revenue. Yeah.
We have been growing double digit on M-PESA over a long period of time. You have seen with return to charging coming in quarter four, M-PESA grew by 12.2%. It will continue to be a growth engine, given that we are expanding our service offerings. We've gone into merchant credit. Peter mentioned about quite a few areas that we have already gone into. They are not scaled up yet. We are creating that ecosystem which enables us to grow more transactions per customer per month. As we are Digitizing the payment ecosystem also through the super apps. The business side as well is still a big opportunity. M-PESA continues. Fixed is a good momentum for us, still on the low percentage to revenue, but it's growing 20%+. We're investing.
Mobile data will continue to be growth driver, still at the early stage. You saw it's growing double digit for you know, many years. Within that, we spoke about enterprise. Those of you, if you have been there in our investors day, there was a presentation around in on enterprise. You saw IoT, ICT, cloud, those are in enterprise space. Those are growing 50%, 60%. Yes, on a small base. That's how the business gets built up. New revenue come at a lower base, and it grows, and you create that. You scale up over a period of time. The content, digital areas, we are revamping our platform.
Of course, at the group level, then we have Ethiopia coming in, as Peter mentioned, will become an important growth driver, top line driver, in the coming years, medium to long term. Thank you. Peter, back to you on DigiFarm and public sector focus. Unless you want to add anything on the, yeah.
Yeah.
Probably, if I could, Peter, before, I think both of the questions at the back, they were specific, and I think I can summarize them to say, what are we doing in the future to counter the road bumps or the speed bumps that we're coming across? I think that will answer the question specifically. I think if you give them a strategy of what we're doing with the, with the fiber, what we're doing with enterprise solutions, what we're doing with technology, it will give comfort.
Yeah. I was going to say, you know, when you are a CEO versus a CFO, I look at the positive piece in terms of. I think your question was, how do we continue to deliver strong performance despite all this whole macro pieces? Dilip is right. You know, we are measured to deliver various aspects of various stakeholders here. The Chairman said we are here to transform lives, so we have to continue to make sure that we are relevant to our customers. We've reduced prices across the board, we've made our products more affordable, and so you'll have seen that we've reduced prices on M-PESA, on mobile data, and so on and so forth.
We need to continue to be more affordable as a brand, and at the same time, protect the interest of shareholders. And that's one of the reasons why we run productivity and so on. On the top line, you'll have seen from Dilip's presentation that we are growing usage across all lines of business at a much faster rate than revenue because we are delivering more value. That is very important. At a time where also the macroeconomic pushes us to actually also manage the bottom line, and that's why productivity is important. Structurally, that's why we are going to solar instead of using diesel. I know there was a question about, are we going to sell towers? Sharing towers will become more important in the future, so that we become a more efficient business.
We're able to price better, also we are able to actually deliver both to customers, but also to our shareholders. Just going back to what the, what the chairman was referring to, we want to accelerate new growth areas. I need to say new growth areas are not just ICT, IoT. Within our existing businesses, like for example, in financial services, we are very good with payments. We penetrated payments quite significantly, but we can improve the offerings. We can go into credit. Credit will primarily be on the consumer side. We can, we have started now going to enterprise side on the credit side.
But there's still a lot of work to do on the wealth, democratizing wealth, democratizing access to insurance, and really using the ecosystem and the platforms we have to be able to offer more broader offerings. When we say the new growth areas, it's not just completely new, it is also adjacencies within our existing business. Mobile data, we only have a third of our customers having 4G. If we double 4G devices in the country, which we intend to do, we will find a lot of people using mobile data. Even in voice, we have actually been growing minutes of use, which is usage, only that we've been reducing price. We are seeing our business continuing to have momentum.
When we do get the value, we do not put it to the bottom line. We put it in additional value to our customers. This is also why Ethiopia coming two, three years from now is very important, because it now starts to fuel the medium to long term aspects of our business. It is creating a more balanced portfolio that allows us to grow more kind of that has less reliance on Kenya, less reliance on connectivity, and less reliance on pure payments. The DigiFarm and public sector, that's where also these new areas come in. We're starting to be seen as a tech provider of services to the public sector. The government in Kenya has put ICT as central to its delivery of its agenda.
Hustler Fund has come in. You've seen... Actually, when Hustler Fund came into, onto our ecosystem, we saw 2 million additional customers coming on, who are not using our services, come on, onto. It is one more service. Every time either you increase customers or you increase one more service. And DigiFarm, you heard us saying that we've started, we are the ones who are providing the e-fertilizer program, in terms of the digital element of the fertilizer program, the user journey, the farmers, securing the fertilizer.
We will use DigiFarm as a way of creating digitization of the agricultural side. The, on the revenue, on the, on the revenue growth profile, I think I've answered generally the question, unless there's something, chairman, you think that... Or, or Dilip. I think we've answered generally the question. I would say we are really pleased with the way that we are managing to offset some of declining revenue base within our core business by accelerating growth in the new areas. Yes, what I was forgetting is I know there was a question on eSIM. I needed to say that, I've just got some numbers, 300 eSIMs already enabled.
7% of our 4G devices are now can accommodate eSIMs and therefore we are already starting on the journey and customers are starting to ask for that. I'm sure over time you see that becoming a mature business. Thank you for that. We shall go to the last round of questions in a bid to keep track of our time. Over to you, Chris.
Right. Thank you. Peter and Chairman, for the last set of questions, we still have quite a bit of questions, but we'll endeavor to make sure that we respond to these questions via our website. To summarize the set of questions that you have for now, Peter, around fixed business, going back to Ethiopia, and 5G as well. Is there plans to have FTTH in more counties aside from where you've invested heavily around Nairobi and Mombasa? On 5G as well, its expansion across the country. I think the question here specific is what timelines are you working with? Combining two questions on Ethiopia is you've talked about the M-PESA license. Specifically, when are you going to roll out, and what is the revenue target for the Ethiopia subsidiary?
Those questions are to you, Peter. Chairman, two questions combined into one. I think the first one specific was on the share price. Please comment on the declining share price. The second question is on management stability. You've talked about both stability and change. Please comment on management stability and specifically on the CEO's tenure. Thank you.
All right. We can do a few more questions from the floor. Yes, go ahead. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Jimmy Mbogoh from KTN. It will be highly unlikely that we end a Safaricom briefing without a question on Fuliza. And what's happening in that space. We recently saw you launch Fuliza Biashara. How is that going, and how has that been received?
We were doing so well. Just kidding. Any other question from the floor? Yes. This side. There's a question.
Hi. Waleed Smaili, 337 Frontier Capital. I had a question on, I've seen a notice on your M-PESA license in Ethiopia. Congratulations by the way on that. That you have a board meeting to approve your subsidiary, and then you launch it in, at the end of 2023. Do you mean the calendar year, December 2023? If that's the case, how come, you know, why the, why the long launch period? Second question is on guidance on MTR reductions. We saw 1 in August last year. Do you expect any further MTR reductions? When we look at Kenya, you know, you haven't had any MTR reductions for quite a long time.
I want to expect the regulator to catch up maybe with some of the regional regulators to bring down the voice charge to maybe where your peers are. Do you expect anything this year or next year? On the site rollout, you've put out, you know, guidance of 3,000 sites. How many of those or maybe just a % split of what would be co-locations would be really appreciated. My final question is on your net income. You've shown that excluding your minority interest, are you still using a majority shareholding of 57%? I only ask this because you have ongoing negotiations with IFC for equity and debt injections.
Okay. One more question from the floor, and then we can wrap this round up.
Hello. My name is Sakwa from Techweez. My first question is related to Fuliza also. We saw in your My Safaricom app update yesterday, you had hidden the Fuliza details. My question there would be, what advice this from a consumer perspective? Second part, also on the My Safaricom app update, you have included the Pochi La Biashara option as a field number, perhaps. My question would be, from a business perspective, is it because this is now a popular product and you felt it should be there? How do the numbers look like? Thank you.
Thank you very much. I'm afraid we can't take any more questions, but we will answer any questions that you have subsequent to this. I'll hand over to the panel for them to answer those.
Thank you.
kind of questions. Thank you.
I think I'll take the first two questions and speak about management stability. I know this has played on the minds of many people, and many of our Twitter warriors have been asking, "What's happening with the CEO?" Well, the CEO is sitting by me, so he's here. He's here to stay. His contract ordinarily, according to the Twitter fellows, should have ended in March. He's here, so that's not so true, and we're happy. The entire management team that was here in January are still here and working very, very hard, and they have the full support of the board. It's very important that an organization like ours has stability.
If you keep making disruptions, you're not going to be able to fulfill your strategy and your, and your midterm goals. I want to confirm to you that there is stability. We support the management. We are pushing them very hard to achieve on the strategy and the goals we have set, not only for this financial year, but for 2 after. I think that deals with that. Regarding share price, I want to deal with some of the macro issues around share price in Kenya on of listed entities, and then I will ask Dilip and Peter probably to speak about them. The question on share price is not only specific to Safaricom. Being a technology company, the way valuations have been done traditionally around tech companies is changing.
The thinking around that is changing. We have seen that most of the listed companies in Kenya are being affected by two major things. One is the devaluing of the shilling. Most of these foreign investors have investments, and they book them in a currency. When they try and mark it back to the currency, they see that the value has dropped considerably. Another issue that many, maybe not many of you are aware, is that there has been some difficulty in taking the dividends out, which then puts a little bit of pressure on some of the funds that are holding these shares. That's what on a global or rather on a macro level, but I'll ask Peter and Dilip to speak to that. Thank you.
Sir, do you want to speak to share price, then I'll answer the rest?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you, Chair. I think you covered the major points. Beyond that, one is the tech valuation, the tech company valuation. Remember, many of you, when you look at our numbers, you look at M-PESA numbers very closely. Our understanding is that the M-PESA, as a fintech, is over-indexed in our valuation. Globally, fintech indices have come down significantly. No matter how profitable we are, which we run a profitable business here on fintech, still you get the hit because it's just the adjustment happening. Second thing, this flight to safety because of the U.S. market becoming more attractive. There is a lot... Two things.
frontier and emerging markets becoming, in terms of a risk assessment, becoming more riskiest and the returns are better in other markets. There is a flight to safety. Our share being the most liquid gets the most hit. While other shares has also got hit, but I think our share has got more hit because it's easy to sell and take the money out. I think that's the other factor. Lastly, I think Ethiopia is still as you can see that we are now providing more and more information. Ethiopia also is something that the, I think, the shareholders are watching out very closely. I think these are some of the additional points that I wanted to add. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Dilip. I'm lucky that I'm with the Chair. I didn't get this question of my contract. You can't write your own contract, so it's great to have the Chair around. On fixed, this is our home business, but also our enterprise, fixed connection. We see it as the one of the biggest areas of growth. We are at about 250,000 connected homes today as people are using it on a regular basis. We think the opportunity is about 1 million, so we could actually go to 1 million. We have just over 450 homes passed. You always have to pass homes and then connect them.
We intend that over the next couple of years, we will go to 1 million homes passed so that then we can double the connected homes. We still see a huge opportunity. I know that someone asked, are we only in Nairobi and so on. We are in 18 counties, not just in Nairobi. You'll have heard that the government also wants to fiberize the country in a significant way. We are going to be part of that work to make sure we connect schools, we connect health centers, and so on. We already have a backbone that is available so that when we go to homes, then it's easier to do the work. The second thing is we'll also use 5G.
I know there was a question on 5G. We see 5G is still a future technology. The use cases are still very few. They tend to be industrial in nature. They tend to also connect with all the IoT work, the Internet of Things pieces that we've spoken about. The initial use case in markets like ours is fixed wireless, primarily in homes and so on. We'll complement areas which don't have fiber, with 5G. Today, devices, because that's where 5G needs acceleration, we only have 400,000 devices in this country, in a country of 35 million mobile customers. We still need devices to get to a level of penetration for us to sell mobile. Also the device cost, the cost of devices is still very high.
Initially, you'll see us, we have about 400 sites, 5G sites, by the end of this half of the new financial year. We intend to double that before the end of the financial year, if you're looking for timeframe. The primary use case would be fixed wireless. Then, from today, we are also going to be launching a test on the mobile side by offering 5 GB-Free for those who have five-5G enabled phones. If any of you in the audience who have 5G enabled phones, please look out for that from tomorrow. Don't ask me for it today, but certainly I'm told we will be able to launch it soon.
In terms of Ethiopia, MFS, I know there was a question about timing. Believe me, we want to go to market as quickly as possible. We have just set up the subsidiary because we are required to set up a subsidiary of Safaricom Ethiopia for us to operate mobile financial services. That is a subsidiary that will now start doing all the contracts with banks and all the other institutions. We could not start that without a license. We have done all the preparatory work, so the actual preparation for launch is not going to take months, it's going to take weeks. I would assume that by early Q2, you should expect that we'll be going to market with the mobile financial services launch in Ethiopia.
Fuliza, I'm like Dilip, I thought the Fuliza question would not show up, here it is. Fuliza is a very successful offering to our consumer side of financial services business. It is very high penetration. We have about between 7 and 8 million customers that use it on a regular basis. Remember, it is emergency credit. We reduced cost of Fuliza as at last year to about 50%, therefore it's much more affordable now, including the first 3 days being free.
If you see a reduction in our numbers, it's primarily because of the reduction in tariff, not because of the reduction in usage, which is good because long term we expect it to be more successful. Clearly now, we have always been intending to go for support merchant credit, whether on the overdraft side, but also on the term loan. We just launched merchant credit overdraft. We have about 73,000 opted-in merchants out of our 600 merchants, which we have today. 600,000, sorry. 600,000 merchants. We intend, I'm told by the team, we intend to hit the 100,000 mark quite soon. Once we start hitting those numbers, then the usage side we can push quite a bit.
So far we've seen KES 2.7 billion borrowed by the merchants who have now opted in. The penetration of borrowed to opted in is still low, but it's because we are not above the line. We last week we launched above the line, so we expect that to progress going forward. Then there was a question I thought the chair would cover. I don't know whether you covered, Chair, on MTR reduction. There was a significant reduction last year of MTR of 40%. When you compare Safaricom or Kenya with the rest of Africa, we are lower quarter, bottom quarter, so we don't have high MTRs in Kenya when you look at KES 0.58 compared to the region. There was that material reduction.
Our view is we should always benchmark, we should always look at the cost profile of the country. Our energy costs are the highest in the region. We are still a growing business or a growing sector that requires investment. MTRs should reflect and incentivize investment to the industry. Because at the end of the day, if we want all this digitization thing to happen and you go with a very low MTR, then you discourage investment, which is what has happened in some of the other markets. You can tell from my comment where our view is on MTR, but we believe that generally the MTR is at the right level if you benchmark against others.
Thanks. I think that's it.
I think there are a couple questions.
On 4G, I think.
No, this is site rollout and net income specific. I can answer that.
Go ahead.
On net income, that's what I confirmed in my presentation. We are in discussion with IFC. They come in as an equity partner. Even if they come in as equity partner, we'll still hold the majority. We'll continue to consolidate. We'll continue to consolidate Ethiopia, we'll remove the majority while calculating the group net income. Yeah. I'm just reconfirming that. On site rollout, there is an assumption in the slide that we have put in for next year. We are giving a kind of a 50/50 split between colocation and own build. Of the sites that we have already built, I think the ratio would be about 25, 75. 75 own build and 25 colocation. Yeah, I think that ends.
Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for all the questions. Thank you for the comments. Thank you for the engagement. Thank you for seeking the confirmation that Peter is still on his seat. He's not moving anywhere. I think this is what the board and the management strives to do, to engage in order to provide clarity for those things that are not clear. We'd like you to note that the presentation for the full year results is now on the website, so you may access it at your pleasure. Thank you for joining us. I was your moderator, Stephen Kiptess. We thank you for taking time to join us this morning. On behalf of the entire Safaricom family, we thank you very much. We thank our sign language interpreters, Hilda and Tobias.
Thank you for making it possible for those that use that means of communication. We would not be good African hosts if we didn't have something for you to put in your stomach. We do have some snacks if you would care to join us after this. To my left is a corridor that'll turn to the right, and then there's 2 double doors to the first left again to our cafeteria. We do have some snacks. No lean meat, just some snacks to keep you full. We thank you very, very much for joining us this year. Have a good stay. Let us stay connected, and God bless you. Thank you.