Safaricom reported KShs 42,658.4 million of profit for FY2024 — but it generated KShs 107,923.6 million of actual cash from running the business that same year. Today you'll learn why those two numbers are so different, and why that difference is normal, not a warning sign.
You've now seen the income statement (Lesson 1) and the balance sheet (Lesson 2), and traced how profit flows into equity (Lesson 3). There's a saying among accountants: "profit is an opinion, cash is a fact." That sounds dramatic, but it points at something real: the profit figure on the income statement involves judgment calls — how fast a tower depreciates, when to recognise revenue, how much bad debt to expect. Cash, by contrast, either moved into or out of the bank account, or it didn't. There's no judgment call about whether cash arrived.
The Cash Flow Statement exists to answer one narrow question: how much actual cash came in and went out this year? It's built from the same underlying accounting records as the income statement, but it strips out every non-cash adjustment to show you the real movement of money.
Recall from Lesson 1 that Safaricom's income statement subtracts depreciation & amortisation (KShs 82,948.0 million in FY2024) before arriving at profit. Depreciation represents equipment — towers, fibre, network gear — wearing out over time. It's a real economic cost. But no cash actually left Safaricom's bank account when that depreciation was recorded; the cash for that equipment was already spent, often years earlier, when it was purchased.
Because depreciation reduces profit without reducing cash, the cash flow statement starts from profit and adds depreciation back, along with a few other non-cash items. This is why operating cash flow is so much higher than profit for a capital-intensive business like a telecom.
| KShs millions | FY2024 | FY2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Cash generated from operations | 149,469.2 | 159,596.8 |
| Income tax paid | (43,700.6) | (45,016.7) |
| Net cash generated from operating activities | 107,923.6 | 116,151.1 |
Source: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024 (figures simplified/grouped for this lesson; audited, currency KShs millions).
Profit for the year (from the income statement): KShs 42,658.4 million. Net cash from operating activities (from the cash flow statement): KShs 107,923.6 million. That's a gap of roughly KShs 65.3 billion — most of it explained by depreciation & amortisation (KShs 82,948.0 million) being added back as a non-cash expense, offset partly by other working-capital movements within "cash generated from operations."
Don't try to reconcile this to the last shilling by hand — the full add-back calculation includes several smaller adjustments not shown here. The point to take away is the direction and scale of the gap: operating cash flow is comfortably higher than accounting profit, which is a reassuring sign, not a red flag.
Every cash flow statement is organised into three sections, each answering a different question about where cash came from or went:
Add the net cash movement from all three sections together, and you get the change in the company's cash balance for the year — the actual number that moved in its bank accounts.
A company can report a profit while its operating cash flow is weak or negative — for example, if it's booking revenue for goods it hasn't been paid for yet, or if a large non-cash gain is propping up profit (we'll see an example of that in Lesson 13). When operating cash flow is consistently lower than profit, that's worth investigating. When it's consistently higher than profit — as with Safaricom here — it usually means non-cash expenses like depreciation are simply large relative to the business, which is normal for asset-heavy industries like telecoms and utilities.
Next lesson, we'll dig into the investing activities section more closely and compute Safaricom's free cash flow — what's actually left over after paying for the equipment needed to keep the network running.
Primary source for this lesson's numbers: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024.
Something unclear, or want to dig into a line item we skipped (like "what exactly counts as cash generated from operations")? Ask your teacher — that's what these sessions are for.