Safaricom CEO, Peter Ndegwa, has raised his personal stake in the telecoms giant by 40%, taking his total shareholding to 8.7 million shares as of March 2025. This is an increase from his previous 6.2 million shares.
Ndegwa, who stepped into the CEO role in April 2022, has been steadily building his stake since holding just 895,000 shares in 2021.
At Safaricom’s closing price of KES 25.70 per share on Monday, his total shares are worth approximately KES 223.6 million ($1.73 million).
Some of this growth came through direct purchases, but a significant portion resulted from the company’s Employee Performance Share Award Plan (EPSAP), an incentive scheme designed to tie executive performance directly to shareholder returns.
In the 2025 financial year, Ndegwa received KES 45 million ($349,955) worth of shares as part of his total pay package of KES 294.2 million ($2.2 million), securing his place as the highest-paid executive on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).
Safaricom’s EPSAP works by the company buying shares on the open market and allocating them to key staff at no cost, subject to a three-year holding period. Once vested, employees can either retain or sell them.
The strategy aims to align employee goals with corporate objectives and discourage talent loss to competitors.
It’s not just Ndegwa benefiting, as Safaricom’s Chief Financial Officer, Dilip Pal, increased his own holding by 65% in the same period, now controlling 2.2 million shares valued at KES 56.5 million ($436,787). His investment shows similar faith in the company’s future.
These executive rewards follow a turnaround in Safaricom’s financials. The company posted an 11% rise in net profit to KES 69.8 billion ($540 million) for the year ended March 2025, a recovery after two years of flat growth blamed largely on heavy spending in Ethiopia.
Growth was fuelled by a surge in mobile money and data services, alongside narrowing losses in Ethiopia.
“Safaricom Ethiopia hit 10 million active customers by July 2025,” the company disclosed, reporting 270% revenue growth to 7.2 billion birr, tripling its mobile money transactions through M-PESA Ethiopia. The firm also rolled out 3,141 active sites, covering 50% of the Ethiopian population with 4G services and creating over 20,000 indirect jobs.
The bigger picture for Safaricom is equally strong. Total revenues surpassed $3 billion for the first time, with KES 388.7 billion reported for FY2025. M-PESA accounted for KES 139.9 billion, or 36% of total service revenues. Data usage across both Kenya and Ethiopia also spiked significantly.
While Safaricom’s expansion into Ethiopia initially dragged down profits, management has stayed assured. The latest results appear to justify that.
