Kenya Power expects capex to fall 16%

Kenya Power, the country’s sole electricity distributor, said on Monday it expected capital expenditure to fall 16 percent in its current financial year as it spends less on maintaining its grid.

The company said capital expenditure was likely to fall to 42 billion shillings ($9.9 million) in its financial year to the end of June 2017 from 50 billion a year earlier.

“We expect that as we increase access to connectivity, we will as well expand the network, but (expenditure) is not as high as the point where we were expanding the network, together with maintaining or refurbishing existing networks,” Ken Tarus, Kenya Power’s general manager for finance, told a briefing.

Last month, the company reported a pretax profit for the full year to the end of June 2016 of 12.1 billion shillings, a fall of 1.4 percent due to the rising costs linked to its expanding its transmission network.

Kenya Power said it had been adding customers at a rate of 30 percent a year for the past three years and had 4.89 million customers connected to the grid at the end June, giving 60 percent of the population access to electricity.

Kenya has been racing to increase access to electricity to support economic expansion by slashing connection charges for new customers.