By AccessKenya
AccessKenya Group, Kenya's first publicly listed ICT company and Kenya's leading Data Services Provider, today announced that it has achieved its year end customer target numbers nearly two months ahead of schedule, with 3,000 customers now signed up to its residential broadband service, Access@Home, and over 3,100 customers now contracted for its leading corporate broadband service, Broadband Max.
“We are delighted to report excellent traction in the growth of customer numbers, spurred on by the increased speeds and value for money we have been offering our corporate and residential customers following the arrival of the international fibre optic cables, Seacom and TEAMS.  We have now broken the 3,000 residential customer barrier – ahead of our target of 2,800 residential customers, and move past 3,100 corporate customers – our original target for this year.” commented Jonathan Somen , Group Managing Director.
“We are the first service provider to have been hooked up to both Seacom and TEAMS through our own connections, giving our customers complete redundancy (backup) on fibre optic cables. We will this week become the first customer to connect to the Tata POP in Kenya, giving us further resilience and flexibility as well as more efficient speeds and routings around the world – once again setting AccessKenya apart as Kenya ‘s leading “data experts”. Our resilient international capacity, together with our leading edge local national networks and our high quality service and reliability, mean that our customers receive the best quality experience in the market for data services.”
“What is particularly encouraging is the very strong uptake in services from the different categories of customers, and our ability to leverage our local and international networks to continue to offer those customers ever improving levels of speed and value for money. Our corporate market share has remained stable at over 40% and we estimate the total market size stands at around 7,500 – not even 20% of the potential market of 40,000 corporates in Kenya . This means there is further potential for enormous growth. We are very pleased that in recent months we have been able to welcome a number of smaller corporates who were previously unable to afford our services onto our network to benefit from real high speed broadband at an affordable price and advanced service and support.”
“On the residential front, where we are targeting customers who can spend 4,000 shillings per month or more to receive a guaranteed speed “mini corporate” service, we now have 3,000 customers out of a market of not more than 20,000 “high end” users. This is a market share of 15% just over one year after we launched Access@Home. There are over 300,000 households in the mid to high end market category and, given the strong growth we have experienced since the arrival of the fibre optic cables in July, we expect to see very significant traction and increase in our market share in 2010. Access@Home is clearly differentiated from the offerings of other service providers in the market by its guaranteed speed, unlimited downloads and higher levels of service and support, and this is contributing to the increased growth of our residential customer base which has in the last one month, recorded an impressive 500 new sign-ups.”
“All in all, we are pleased to see that not only have we been able to offer our customers significant speed and price reductions, but that these factors, combined with excellent service and reliability, have meant that we are starting to see a consistent acceleration in uptake of our services by a wide variety of different corporate and residential customers” concluded Somen.
