Safaricom shareholders have until the end of September to decide whether to receive their dividend through M-Pesa or traditional means.
In two separate paid up advertisements carried in the dailies on Thursday, the mobile phone provider has given its over 800,000 shareholders up to September 30, 2009 to opt-in.
“The Safaricom dividend payment Opt-in Service is applicable to local individual investors only. Partnerships and companies are not eligible,” said the advertisements, which also gave a list of designated opt-in locations across Kenya.
To register, each shareholder is required to submit a CDS account statement or share certificate, and an original identification document and a copy.
The move follows approval by the shareholders of the management’s proposal to pay dividend through M-Pesa during their annual general meeting held in Nairobi in August.
It makes Safaricom the first company to tap into technology to pay its shareholders the dividend, a move aimed at cutting costs associated with the traditional form of positing cheques.
Incidentally, the AGM which approved the electronic system of paying out dividend, was also a first one for Kenya’s corporate world as East Africa’s most profitable company did not give its shareholders refreshments and gifts commonly associated with company AGMs as part of its austerity measures.
KenGen has also expressed similar intentions to cut on costs and logistics’ nightmares of paying dividend to its over 230,000 shareholders.
