Safaricom was fined Sh270.1 million by the Communications Authority of Kenya in the year ended March, 2017, for poor quality of services.
The fine is a 72% increase from the Sh157 million that the company was fined last year over a similar period.
According to its 2017 sustainability report unveiled yesterday, the fine represents 0.15 % of the firms gross annual revenues as at March 2017.
From the authority evaluation, Safaricom attained 62.5 % compliance against the minimum required of 80%.
This was a 12.5% improvement from the 2013/2014 financial year where they achieved a 50% threshold.
This is the fourth time the telecommunications firm has failed to meet the required level of quality of service as prescribed by the communication sector regulator. In 2015, Safaricom was fined Sh500, 000 for poor service quality.
Some of the parameters evaluated by the regulator include call completion rate, call drop rate, call block rate, speech quality, call set-up time, handover success rate, call set-up success rate and signal strength of the operators from the base transmission station.
It should be noted that we, along with the other Kenyan mobile network operators, have expressed concerns regarding the quality of service measures used by the authority, we continue to engage them with expectations that our concerns will be met, the report states in part.
While the fine has gone up, the telecommunications firm reported dismissing at least 52 members of staff due to fraud and warning another 14. This was based on findings of 33 investigated cases of fraud, up from 31 in 2016.
The types of fraud that led to the dismissals include theft, asset misappropriation, policy breaches such as unauthorized access to data systems and fraudulent SIM swap, among others.
Safaricom also announced a 17 % increase on its impact to the Kenyan economy, as it contributes 6.5% to the country gross domestic product.
The increase brings its total value to Sh486 billion, up from Sh405.87 billion total values for Kenyan society during the 2016/2017 financial year.
On achieving the globally set sustainable development goals, the firm is now eyeing the second phase of implementation and expect a positive outcome in their 2017/2018 performance indicators.
In their first phase, which was aimed at raising awareness, they reported that at least 83 % of their staff are now aware of the goals.
The integration of SDGs has helped us appreciate that lasting solutions need to be commercially viable and based on feasible economic models if they are to be scalable and sustainable, Collymore said.