Africa’s largest cellular community operator MTN Group continues to cement its dominance within the telecoms enviornment, reporting 6.8% growth in complete group subscribers to 284.9 million for the primary 9 months of 2022, supporting the group’s sturdy service revenue growth developments throughout its main working areas.
The Johannesburg-based cellular operator says its general service revenue for the third quarter ended September 2022 grew by 14.3%, whereas group earnings earlier than curiosity, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) elevated by 14.7% within the interval.
Through its expense effectivity programme the group says it delivered financial savings of R2.8 billion within the year-to-date.
The group’s South Africa operations – its second-largest contributor to group service revenue after MTN Nigeria – led the growth in subscribers, reportedly attracting over 800 000 (or 8.1%) extra clients within the nation, bringing the overall native customer base to 35.9 million.
The South African operations additional reported a 3.5% rise in service revenue growth, supported by a resilient client postpaid enterprise which delivered 4.2% growth.
However, MTN notes that rising inflation in addition to continued energy cuts have contributed to a muted 0.4% service revenue growth within the native client pay as you go market.
“Amid unprecedented load shedding, which negatively affected network availability, MTN South Africa expanded market share, delivered encouraging underlying service revenue growth, strong expense controls and investment in network resilience and expanding the 5G coverage,” group president and CEO Ralph Mupita mentioned.
“Supported by an increase in smartphone penetration, MTN SA continued to make data more affordable: the effective data tariff reduced by 23.4% year on year (YoY). This helped stimulate usage for both prepaid and postpaid subscribers. Work on network resilience and availability progressed well, but persistent load shedding in the last quarter of the year could impact revenue growth, particularly in the consumer prepaid market,” he added.
Despite having to navigate a change in Nigeria’s SIM regulation guidelines, MTN Nigeria reported 20.7% growth in service revenue.
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Data and Fintech
Group voice revenue improved by 2.7%, whereas information revenue elevated by a robust 33.2%, underpinned by a 14.9% YoY enhance in energetic information customers and a robust growth in information site visitors of 39.7%.
To assist the excessive demand for information, MTN deployed R23.8 billion in Capex within the interval to maintain its networks and know-how platforms, additional prioritising its protection capability for the 4G networks and the rollout of 5G websites.
“In Nigeria we rolled out 218 5G sites and in SA 483 5G sites, bringing the total 5G sites rolled out for the group to the end of Q3 to 824 sites.”
Fintech revenue for the group got here in 12.9% stronger YoY, led by 23.3% YoY growth in Mobile Money (MoMo) energetic month-to-month customers to 63 million, in addition to volumes of processed transactions via the platform, growing by 32.7% to 9.5 billion.
“We are encouraged by the overall strength of our fintech ecosystem, with solid momentum in the underlying KPIs across our e-commerce & payments, banktech, remittances and joint venture (JV) insurtech verticals, as well as the build out of agents, merchants and MoMo app adoption by our subscribers,” the group mentioned.
Mupita added that it noticed sturdy transaction volumes pushed by growth in clients, brokers and retailers.
“In the near term, revenue growth has been impacted by new taxes in a few markets, but we continue to see the case for structural and compelling growth for fintech services in the medium term that will deepen financial inclusion across Africa,” he mentioned.
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Listen: CFO Tsholofelo Molefe discusses MTN’s interim outcomes to finish June 2022 on the SAfm Market replace with Moneyweb (or learn the transcript right here)
