On Monday morning Kenyans woke up to the sad news that the most successful Safaricom Chief Executive Officer Bob William Collymore had passed away. According to reports, Bob passed away at his Nairobi home on Monday morning after a long battle with Leukemia, a rare form of cancer that is curable at its first stages.
Due to health reasons, the soft Spoken CEO was planning to step down in August 2019 to go seek for further treatments but the government’s insistence he should be succeeded by a Kenyan had delayed announcing a replacement, forcing the CEO’s service to be extended for a further 12 months.
During his tenure at Kenya’s biggest telecommunication company Safaricom, Bob Collymore made tremendous achievements.
One of his most sang achievements that Mr. Collymore achieved while at Safaricom is building Safaricom into East Africa’s most profitable company, thanks to the popular mobile money transfer service M-Pesa and a growing customer base. These services at Safaricom have maintained the company’s top performance in the communication’s platform.
During his tenure, Safaricom’s share price tremendously increased by more than 400 percent to 28.00 shillings ($0.28). Growing from a small company under his directions, Safaricom has grown from a number of 19m customers in 2015 to a whopping 30million subscribers in 2018 which is more than 62% of the mobile market share.
In 2018, Safaricom under Bob Collymore’s leadership reported revenues of KSh116.5bn ($1.3bn) which translate to 62% of the total market share and has developed an international reputation for innovation.
During the period, service revenue was also up from seven per cent to Sh240.3 billion. This was supported by M-Pesa revenue growth of 19.2 per cent to Sh74.99 billion as a fixed service revenue increased by 22.7% to Sh8.19 billion.
He has also led the charge against regulatory efforts to clip the company’s wings due to its dominant size. In 2012 Bob Collymore’s achievements were recognized worldwide and he was awarded the Moran of the Burning Spear (MBS)
Safaricom’s latest product Fuliza issued Ksh 45 billion to Kenyans in its first three months! Fuliza is a micro-credit product that was launched on January 5, 2019, in partnership with two banks – CBA and KCB and according to Bob Collymore, the product had helped over 20 million Kenyans on a daily basis in the process generating a daily revenue of approximately sh200 million to the company per day.
The Safaricom boss is also worth over Sh200 million in assets and cash both in Kenya and overseas
Bob Collymore, who has been working for over 30 years, has a residential house in London, UK worth USD 530,000 (about Ksh 53 million), cash balances in local banks worth USD 203,000 (about Ksh20,300,000), Safaricom Limited shares worth Ksh 18 million and Vodafone PLC shares worth 87 million.
Bob Collymore used to wake up at 5.15 am every day and he used to say that his greatest goal is to make sure that Safaricom customers are satisfied. He once confessed that he gets very stressed when Safaricom experiences any network outages because he is aware of how the customers become affected.