You've spent seventeen lessons learning to read individual pieces of Safaricom's financial statements. Today you put every piece back together, run the full checklist against Safaricom's real numbers, and land on a reasoned view of whether its market price looks justified — no guessing, no hype, just what the numbers say.
Every number in this lesson has already appeared somewhere earlier in the course. Nothing here is a new concept. What's new is the discipline of running through all of it, in order, on one company, the way you'd actually do it if you were deciding whether to buy Safaricom shares. Think of this as the moment you stop practising individual scales and play the whole piece.
1) Check the profit trend for red flags. 2) Check whether profit is backed by real cash. 3) Check margins and returns. 4) Check leverage. 5) Check what the market price implies, and flag anything stale. Each step below uses only confirmed FY2024 figures from Safaricom's audited annual report.
Safaricom's FY2024 revenue grew, but profit for the year fell — the first red flag you learned to spot back in Lesson 1.
| KShs millions | FY2024 | FY2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | 349,447.2 | 310,904.8 |
| Depreciation & amortisation (total) | (82,948.0) | (54,865.0) |
| Profit for the year | 42,658.4 | 52,482.8 |
Source: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024, p.177 (figures simplified/grouped for this lesson; audited, currency KShs millions).
Revenue rose +12.4% while profit for the year fell about -18.7%. As Lesson 1 and Lesson 13 established, most of that gap traces to depreciation & amortisation nearly doubling (KShs 54,865.0m → 82,948.0m), driven by heavy network investment including the Ethiopia expansion — not a sign of a shrinking core business, but exactly the kind of movement worth explaining rather than ignoring.
Lesson 4 taught you to check operating cash flow against net profit. Lesson 5 taught you to then subtract capex to find free cash flow.
| KShs millions | FY2024 |
|---|---|
| Net cash generated from operating activities | 107,923.6 |
| Purchase of property and equipment | (66,636.1) |
| Acquisition of intangible assets | (30,992.5) |
Source: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024 (figures simplified/grouped for this lesson; audited, currency KShs millions).
Operating cash flow (107,923.6) is far higher than profit for the year (42,658.4) — reassuring, since it means the depreciation charge that dragged down profit is a non-cash expense, not a sign of cash trouble. But capex is heavy: 66,636.1 + 30,992.5 = 97,628.6 spent on property, equipment and intangibles. Free cash flow works out to 107,923.6 − 97,628.6 = ≈ 10,295 million — thin, because Safaricom is reinvesting almost everything it generates.
Lesson 9 and Lesson 10 introduced net profit margin and return on equity (ROE) — both computed transparently from confirmed figures.
| KShs millions | FY2024 | FY2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Profit for the year | 42,658.4 | 52,482.8 |
| Total revenue | 349,447.2 | 310,904.8 |
| Total equity | 335,747.9 | 263,365.9 |
Source: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024 (figures simplified/grouped for this lesson; audited, currency KShs millions).
Both measures moved the same direction: less profit squeezed out of every shilling of revenue, and less profit returned on every shilling of shareholders' equity, than a year earlier.
Lesson 11 and Lesson 12 introduced debt-to-equity. Safaricom's borrowings relative to equity:
| KShs millions | 2024 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Borrowings (non-current) | 63,093.2 | 42,050.0 |
| Borrowings (current) | 45,053.9 | 45,555.4 |
| Total borrowings | 108,147.1 | 87,605.4 |
| Total equity | 335,747.9 | 263,365.9 |
Source: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024 (figures simplified/grouped for this lesson; audited, currency KShs millions).
Debt-to-equity FY2024: 108,147.1 ÷ 335,747.9 = 0.32. Safaricom borrows roughly a third of what its shareholders have invested — a modest, non-alarming level for an ordinary (non-bank) company, as Lesson 12 established.
Safaricom's FY2024 profit before tax (84,687.4) included a KShs 22,363.2 million hyperinflationary monetary gain from its Ethiopian operations — a real, audited accounting adjustment, but not money earned by selling airtime, data or M-PESA services. None of the margin or ROE figures above strip this out, so treat the 12.2% margin and 12.7% ROE as slightly flattered by a non-operating item, not as a pure measure of the core telecom business.
Now the part that connects the fundamentals above to the number on a trading screen. As of mid-July 2026, Safaricom trades around KShs 35.95 per share, up from KShs 28.35 at the start of the year (+26.8% YTD), giving a market capitalisation of roughly KShs 1.35 trillion (as of 29 June 2026). Its most recent dividend was KShs 0.85 per share (semi-annual), for a trailing dividend yield of about 4.17%.
Safaricom's confirmed FY2024 basic EPS is KShs 1.6 — but Safaricom carried out a stock split after FY2024. Dividing today's price by that pre-split EPS (35.95 ÷ 1.6 ≈ 22.5x) would produce a P/E ratio that mixes numbers from before and after a share count change, which is not a like-for-like comparison. Any such figure here is illustrative only — not a precise or final answer. Before making any real decision, check Safaricom's investor relations page for post-split, current EPS.
What you can say with confidence, without relying on that stale P/E: the FY2024 statements show a company whose revenue is growing, whose operating cash flow comfortably exceeds its accounting profit, whose debt load is modest, but whose margins and ROE both compressed year-on-year, largely due to a near-doubling of depreciation from network investment (partly offset, on paper, by a one-off currency gain). A KShs 1.35 trillion market cap is a bet on that heavy investment paying off in future growth — the FY2024 numbers alone don't prove or disprove that bet; they just tell you honestly what happened this year.
| Measure | FY2024 | FY2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue growth | +12.4% | — |
| Profit for the year growth | -18.7% | — |
| Operating cash flow vs profit | 107,923.6 vs 42,658.4 | 116,151.1 vs 52,482.8 |
| Free cash flow (approx.) | ≈ 10,295 | — |
| Net profit margin | 12.2% | 16.9% |
| Return on equity | 12.7% | 19.9% |
| Debt-to-equity | 0.32 | 0.33 |
Source: figures derived in Steps 1–4 above from Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024 (audited, currency KShs millions); see individual tables for page references.
Next lesson, we'll run this exact same five-step walkthrough on Equity Group — a bank, with a structurally different statement layout (deposits as liabilities, loans as assets, no inventory) — and reach a reasoned view on whether its roughly KShs 327 billion market cap looks justified by its FY2024 fundamentals.
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 "how exactly does a stock split change EPS")? Ask your teacher — that's what these sessions are for.