By Ed Cropley CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - M-PESA, the two-year-old mobile money transfer network run by Kenyan mobile phone operator Safaricom, should start generating a profit this year, chief executive Michael Joseph said on Thursday. Joseph said the network, which allows people with no bank accounts to send each other money for minimal cost via their mobile phones, was breaking even on a month-by-month basis, but was still dealing with the costs of setting up its back office. "I expect to see that this year it will be EBITDA positive," he told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Africa meeting in Cape Town. "It's quite an expensive business, even though it appears on the surface not to be. It actually takes quite a lot of support," he said. M-PESA, which has 6.5 million customers, or one in six Kenyans just over two years after launching, contributed four percent of Safaricom's revenue in 2008, he added. Besides generating its own revenue stream, M-PESA and similar services on rival emerging market operators such as Zain, are seen as vital means of creating customer loyalty in Africa's increasingly competitive mobile markets. Faced with diminishing returns on its voice business, Safaricom is also on a major push into the data market, which was likely to take off with the arrival this week in Kenya of a large undersea Internet cable linking East Africa to Europe and Asia. | 
