Kenya Airways 2006 AGM

The new Chairman Evanson Mwaniki is a complete professional, who’s rather laid back compared to his predecessor, Omolo Okero, who used to get rather testy at times as meetings were stretched with inane questions.

Like last year (2005 KQ AGM), the AGM was again held at the Bomas of Kenya conference hall, which is quite spacious and has three halls with video screens to accommodate excess crowds of shareholders.

getting boring
Attending a KQ AGM two years ago was one of the events that inspired the beginning of bankelele, but after attending a few of these, it gets monotonous and repetitive. Shareholders ask the same questions year after year, grumble about the same things, make crazy demands of management and generally turn the events into a public circus. Nothing new today, at the 30th AGM of the company and 10th year of its partnership with KLM, but here goes;

Stay low-tech
A brief slideshow of KQ’s impressive performance was let-down by a technical hitch that prevented charts from being shown on-screen for a few minutes of the Chairman’s opening remarks. The same thing happened to Michael Joseph at the beginning of his Safaricom talk last weekend and he was able to perform even better, IMHO, than he would have with a power point show.

Director election
No drama today unlike in years past when several candidates would apply. After last year, many must have realised that it is pointless to apply unless you have either the KLM (26% owner) of the Government of Kenya (23%) backing you. This year the PS Ministry of Transport and Micah Cheserem were up for re-election with only perennial candidate Japheth Rob applying to join the board – and the results should be a foregone conclusion.

Shareholder Queries

Airbus shutout
Japheth Rob made a for Airbus aircraft to be included in the Kenya Airways fleet again arguing that Airbus aircraft the airline had till a few years ago were superior workhorses that had delivered good returns. But MD, Titus Naikuni, replied that extensive fleet evaluation had led the airline to go with Boeing aircraft in recent years and alluded that bringing back Airbus would mean increased costs in pilot (& personnel) training and maintenance capacity for an Airbus fleet.

KLM shareholding
Government is comfortable with it now. The split should not be seen as 26% KLM and 23% government, but rather 26% KLM and 74% Kenyan shareholders and that this model should be emulated by other parastatals in future.

Others
Questions asked today, as they are every year included;

  • Can we have more dividend? (asked three times today by three different shareholders!)
  • Can we fly in a plane /can you give shareholders discounted tickets? (also asked three times)
  • Conduct AGM in Swahili?
  • Can we have more women directors. Chairman replied that no women applied this year. He also said that many companies are looking to add women directors to their boards but that many of the qualified ones have executive positions and are not willing/able to find time to attend to additional board matters.
  • One said the packed lunch was not adequate (today’s handout to shareholders included tote bag, t-shirt, and a lunch box (with soda, two water bottles, chicken, beef sandwich, bun, yoghurt, an apple & orange, fruit juice, cake and chewing gum!)
  • Can you allow shareholders to bring kids to the AGM
  • Can you pay for our transport home?

Other News

Scangroup next
One of the VIP guests at the AGM today was Bharat Thakrar, the Scangroup CEO to see what kind of AGM he’ll have to hold for his 90,000 shareholders in a few months.

CMA shareholders initiatives

  • cross listing by Kenya Airways on the Uganda and Tanzania Stock exchanges has brought only 38 individual and 5 institutional investors from these countries.
  • CDS: Of the current 78,000 KQ shareholders, only 12,000 have immobilized their shares in their CDS accounts.

Investor Awards
The 2006 Africa investor awards will be held at the Safari Park Hotel on November 9th and Kenyan companies are encouraged to enter here for any of sixteen categories. Entries close September 15th.</a

Jay Z disses Kenya
His blue print for Africa or concert tour schedule includes Tanzania, Nigeria, Angola and South Africa – but no Kenya!

Scangroup IPO Results

Scangroup received over 100,000 applications of which 12,800 rejected, leaving 96,000 valid applicants

Individuals
93,000 applications
– Those who applied for 1,000 shares have been allocated 300 shares
– 10,000 get 500
– 100,000 get 1,000
– 1 million get just 3,000 shares

Institutions
2,900 applications
Who applied for up to 10,000 will get full allocations.

Employees
80 applications
Those who applied for up to 15,000 will get a full allocation.

Lesson of the day: apply as an institution if allocation has been pre-determined prior to IPO

Other

Declining money transfers
Fewer people are using Western Union to transfer money. Despite reducing their fees earlier this year, it seems more people are using alternatives and other other methods to get around the still high costs.

Wish of the day
Be like Nepal where protesters have forced the to government to reduce fuel prices. Here, notorious Koinange Street has the highest prices and the fuel stations there are always the first to raise prices, giving an indication of how prices will soon be in the rest of the City. (From dealbreaker)

Funding for Kenyan SME’s
The European Investment Bank (EIB) will contribute US $5 million to the Business Partners International Kenya SME Fund (BPI-K) which invests between USD50,000 (Kshs. 3.75million) and USD500,000 (Kshs. 38m) in small? companies.

People
– The Economist catches up with Ayisi Makatiani.

– Who is the Aga Khan besides being a major shareholder through his foundation in NMG, Diamond Trust, Jubilee, Serena and numerous other private, educational and charitable initiatives in Kenya?

Safaricom Success

Mr. Michael Joseph, the Safaricom CEO, gave a talk over the weekend on leadership and the successful transformation of the company from a moribund department of a dying parastatal (Telkom Kenya) to arguably Kenya’s most successful company. The Q&A session also brought out more candid answers particularly on challenges he, and the company, faced as well as the performance of its competitors. And since Safaricom is not (yet) a public company, this is perhaps the closest thing to an AGM of shareholders for the company until 2009.

Safaricom CEO, Michael Joseph
The Beginning

The Company started in 2000. Vodafone (40%) put in $20 million while Telkom (Government of Kenya) who were supposed to chip in with $30 million, didn’t put down any cash, giving only their dilapidated network infrastructure and 17,000 existing, and angry, customers. The company had 5 employees led by the CEO who had done a similar start-up in Hungary. However, three days after the company launched, its network collapsed, damaging its reputation for network quality.

Today

Safaricom’s revenue is comparable to East African Breweries and Kenya Airways. It is several times larger than its competitor, has 900 employees, and 4.6 million subscribers (the company also envisions Kenya as having 16 million potential subscribers). It has invested 55 billion shillings, all internally generated, constructing its network, which now covers about 20% of the geography of the country.

Success factors

Safaricom made several key decisions early on, but was helped by the collapse of Telkom landlines and, in hindsight, some blunders by Kencell (now Celtel) which launched around the same time and which initially had a larger subscriber base in the early years. These include:

  • Focus on prepaid customers The company felt that in a country without a strong credit background industry, consumers would only spend what they had. Also, the CEO felt that they would need these mass-market subscribers to support corporate customers who were more lucrative. Today they have 90% of the corporate market, which Kencell set out to target initially.
  • Billing per second for calls while Kencell billed per minute. Safaricom sacrificed about 20% to 40% revenue per call but again, it won more customers who preferred to only pay exactly for airtime they used. There was much debate about which method was superior, but ultimately Safaricom won out.
  • Having great customer service which was free and available 24 hours a day. While customer service is only paid lip service in Kenya he felt this would be important as consumers ventured into the new mobile phone industry. Meanwhile, Kencell’s customer service was available only during working hours and was not free. The CEO knows it is difficult to get through to customer service but that’s because the company gets an average of 25,000 calls a day, sometimes double. Yet 95% of these calls are simple, “how-to” questions (e.g. send SMS, change tariff) everyday questions, answers to which are found in phone brochures.

Marketing
Even though the company is 40% UK-owned, all their products and advertisements cultivate a Kenyan image utilizing the beauty of the Kenyan landscape and Swahili words (sambaza, bamba etc.) to reinforce how ‘Kenyan’ the company is.

CEO was very dismissive of Celtel (a pan- African company) whose advertisements have nothing Kenyan about them and faults their marketing strategy for assuming all Africans are homogeneous. Earlier, Kencell also introduced (French) Sagem phones to Kenya, which no one had heard of while Safaricom used Motorola and Siemens as their basic phone models.

Competition

  • Safaricom’s average revenue per user (ARPU) is 2 X Celtel’s and has not dropped in three years even as subscribers have more than doubled, leading the CEO to conclude that most Celtel customers are primarily Safaricom customers. Even though the company has network difficulty in some places e.g. Industrial Area, Safaricom has never shaken the impression, wrong he feels, that Celtel has a better network or clearer calls. He also says Celtel has a very high-cost structure since they have ½ the revenue but only 1/10 of operating profit before finance charges.
  • The CEO is not worried about competition from CDMA wireless as long as it is in the hands of Telkom Kenya which is still a bloated giant (17,000 employees servicing 240,000 customers)
  • He is also not worried about a third entrant or other mobile operators, or new service providers, but accepts that they will change the industry.

Financing

The first time the company took on a loan, conditions were very stringent and the loan could have been recalled e.g. if cash flow dipped. But the second time they went borrowing (12 billion for network expansion) the company was so established, they were able to dictate terms to the banks. They borrowed at 1% above the T-bill rate while also retiring old debt. He also said Kencell (Celtel) had much higher finance charges since they had borrowed and were still paying back an expensive foreign currency loan from their then-parent company (Vivendi.)

Other

Peculiar Kenyan call habits: CEO denies he ever made this infamous statement attributed to him. However, he admitted he doesn’t understand why phone traffic between 8:00 p.m. & 8:40 p.m. on weeknights is four times higher than normal, even though cheaper call rates are also available on weekends and at other times during the day.

Gift of gab: The most profitable call sites in Kenya are Garissa and Mandera. Safaricom has also set up call sites to meet high demand at remote refugee outposts such as Kakuma and Dadaab. Kenyans are also high users of text messages (next to the Philippines) while Nairobi has the highest density of mobile calls in the daytime (higher than New York) partly because landlines are poor.

Social responsibility: The company spends 200 million shillings a year on corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects through its foundation and its biggest sponsorship will be the 2007 Mombasa cross country ($250,000).

Recruitment: Safaricom only employs graduates, yet somehow 70% of them fail a pre-employment test the company administers. They are now recruiting overseas and the average age of employees is 24 (seems young).

Premium rate services: CEO hates these companies who run promotions that charge 20 and 50 shillings above normal Safaricom rates. He has to let some of them use his network, by law, but makes it as expensive as possible for them to do so.

Bad stats: When the company launched, it found that most of the government statistics on income, expenditure, and population were, and still are, wrong as shown by the number of subscribers the company has.

Honesty and integrity are the best virtues he has learned to have on his job. This has enabled him to perform his job and shielded him from unreasonable requests/offers from politicians and business people and if there had even been a whiff of anything less, he would have been asked to compromise himself or the company.

Next CEO: He’s reluctant to retire even though he knows its inevitable. His last contract was renewed, after a long battle between forces from Central and Western Kenya who each wanted their own candidate, but were unable to agree, leaving him as the compromise candidate. He will prepare for retirement by stepping back as the face and spokesman of Safaricom slowly and we will soon see other senior managers at the company take on more public roles in the future.

Future

  • CEO wants the industry measure and focus to change from ARPU to ARPU margins
  • Call costs will come down and there will be more price competition (perhaps even 5/= per call) as new competitors and technology become factors down. He expects Safaricom profits to drop from next year and may have to start cutting costs to stay competitive.
  • Safaricom will have a new big product by year-end, which will change our lives. The company will also add a new tariff this year.

Safaricom IPO

  • IPO was planned to happen this year, but the Cabinet rejected the proposal until Telkom is first privatised. The reason is that Safaricom is Telkom’s only valuable asset, and they did not want to diminish Telkom’s IPO value and prospects. So the 25% sale will be in 2008 and will be bigger than Kengen’s, by far, according to the CEO.

Mid week Business

Insider Trading
The CMA has announced an investigation into the dramatic price rise of EA Cables in the last two weeks. I understand the price gains since the stock split was announced but what the CMA should really look at are the price surges before the split was announced, and which took place on very thin volumes traded.

Jaindi Kisero, editor of the East African, explains how a stockbroker can manipulate the price of a stock upwards through “transactions done across the books – where two nominee accounts belonging to the same broker outbid each other and move the price to the level they have predetermined in their office away from the scrutiny of other players”. Maybe the result would look like this. EA Cables is likely to be innocent but brokers are not being candid about their nominee account dealings. The may also be a factor behind the steep day one price surges of Kengen and Equity Bank.

Banking Changes
– Bank merger: EABS Bank is seeking a merger with another bank to propel it into the top 10 of Kenyan banks. It was formed by a merger of East African Building Society and Akiba Bank in 2005. from East African.
– CFC has cut back its Saturday banking hours to a more conventional 9a.m. to noon. It appears that longer hours don’t mean longer profits and such banking may be better left to ATM’s which are 24-hours. The pioneer of longer hours was NIC’s MOVE.
– NBK has linked its ATM’s with Pesa Point.

City vs. Justice
On Monday morning, the parking lot at the Law Courts operated by the Nairobi City Council had been fenced and had signs proclaiming the parking as the site of a new courthouse and police post. But within an hour, staff from the city council had demolished the mabati fence and resumed normal parking activities.

Airlines
– New look KQ: Kenya Airways has advertised for the design of new uniforms and interior design of aircraft. Details at www.kenya-airways.com and deadline is September 30.
– Went to JKIA on Sunday Afternoon. The local terminal was clearly overcrowded with jets having nowhere to park and passengers had to walk past several other aircraft as there are no walkways. The airport authorities have scrapped plans to utilise the old (Embakasi) airport but something needs to be done soon. I remember arriving at Mumbai and being driven in a taxi out of the airport at 2.a.m. to the local terminal for a connecting flight, which was a bit scary for a first visit to India.
– African time If you get bumped by KQ as often happens these days it’s because the airline typically has about 5% no shows and so adjust their booking to ensure that there are no empty seats on flights. Sometimes everyone shows up hence someone has to get bumped.

Standard goes main
In January shares of the Standard Group will move from the alternative board to the main listing board at the NSE.

Absurd quote
A shortage of baby diapers in Nairobi is to being blamed on the Lebanon-Israel war in the Middle East.

Jobs

Chief financial officer at the Aga Khan Hospital Mombasa. Apply to hr@msa.akhskenya.org by August 25.

Programme officer at the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE)> Apply through Deloitte at esd@deloitte.co.ke

NGO Council: Deputy director finance & administration, finance manager, legal officer, IT operator, Project officer, and other vacancies. Deadline is August 25.

Africa region director at the American Red Cross. check www.redcross.org/jobs for derails

Standard Group
Apply to the Head of HR
– Senior accountant (Treasury) D/L is August 18
– Sales executives. D/L is 26 August
– Regional sales & distribution managers. D/L is 30August

World Bank: The deadline for applications to the WB Young Professionals Program is August 31.

Googling out Corruption

There was an intriguing, and sadly funny, piece on Nation TV (NTV’s 9 PM news) last night where reporter Robert Nagila called the offices of a company that has a controversial $2m tender to supply raw material to EAPC.

Someone (perhaps some directors) could be overheard mumbling what to tell the reporter who had unexpectedly called, before coming back on the line to tell Nagila that all company information, including a (Nairobi) office location were confidential matters that he would not disclose.

A google search of the company name reveals that the only mention of the company are in Kenyan newspapers and only in reference to the supply contract. Not every answer is in Google/ search engines but it gives the impression that the company was formed for only one purpose, or has only one business, which is to supply EAPC.

Compare that to the expose by Sharesleuth of a dubious company attempting to rip off investors diving into the bio-fuel craze. Yet the owners of this company, which actually exists, engaged in more elaborate side tricks, including a reverse merger, to prop up and get their shares trading at rising prices.

Google/search engine results are not perfect it goes to show that the days of briefcase contractors of the Anglo-Leasing kind may be numbered since a simple Google such can reveal something or nothing about a company and its expertise. What would have happened if staff at the AG’s Chambers had googled the names of any of the Anglo Leasing companies? And would they still have signed off on these mind-boggling contracts with international (non existent) company?