Safaricom remains the biggest company in East Africa by a wide margin, with a market cap of $8.4bn, ahead of a tightly packed group of MTN Uganda and two Tanzanian banks, CRDB Bank and NMB Bank. The Kenyan telecoms company recorded a 55% increase in half year profits for the six months to the end of September 2025 to 65.2bn shillings ($501m), buoyed by improved performance in Ethiopia.
Taking advantage of deregulation in Kenya’s northern neighbour, Safaricom launched in Ethiopia in 2022 and although it has registered losses in its first years operating in that market, the loss for the half year to September was 59% lower than in the same period in 2024. It also achieved a 10.9bn shillings ($84m) rise in revenue from mobile financial service M-Pesa to 88.1bn shillings ($678m).
The rise of CRDB and NMB is one of the most striking developments in this year’s survey, with CRDB taking third position with a rise from $762m to $2.7bn and NMB Bank fourth jumping from $1.1bn to $2.7bn over the past twelve months. For the first time ever, this places Tanzania’s biggest banks ahead of their Kenyan counterparts, including Equity Bank and KCB Group.
However, the Kenyan banking sector as a whole remains far stronger than that of Tanzania, with more large banks operating in its domestic market. Indeed, eleven Kenyan companies across all sectors are included in our regional Top 20, with six from Tanzania and three from Uganda, with the banking and telecoms sectors particularly well represented. By contrast, CRDB and NMB dominate their domestic market, where they account for 60% of total banking profits, contrasting sharply with the income declines registered by the Tanzanian operations of some foreign-owned banks.
But the advance of the Tanzanian financial services sector is impressive, with Tanzanian banks as a whole recording net profits of 2.47 trillion shillings ($950m) in 2025, representing a 14.7% increase on the previous year, which in turn was a 40.9% rise on 2023. Total Tanzania banking sector assets reached 79.4 trillion shillings ($3.05bn) in 2025.
East African companies are growing in tandem with wider economic growth in the region. The number of companies valued at more than $1bn stands at 14 this year, up from just eight in our 2025 survey. Tanzania Cigarette Company is the 20th biggest listed company in East Africa with a value of $471m in this year’s table, down from $636m last year. Yet this is a big increase on the $270m Tanzania Portland Cement needed to secure the same position in our 2025 table, highlighting that the strong growth achieved in the region has not only been made among East Africa’s very biggest companies.
To see the complete rankings of the Top 250 Companies in Africa 2026, click here.