MTN shows significant subscription and mobile money unit growth in 2022

Pan-African mobile community operator MTN has launched its annual monetary outcomes for the yr ended December 31, 2022, displaying sturdy growth in the variety of subscribers and its mobile money unit.

MTN’s complete subscribers rose 6% to 289 million, with information subscribers rising by greater than 12% to 137 million and Mobile Money customers up by 21% to 69 million. The firm additionally reported a 15.3% improve in service income to R194 billion whereas earnings earlier than curiosity, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA)  elevated by 14.3% to R90 billion.

Mobile Money transaction quantity was up 34% year-on-year to 13.4 billion whereas the worth of the transactions was up 16% (utilizing fixed forex) to $221 billion. The variety of brokers elevated by 30% to 1.3 million and retailers by 86% to 1.5 million.

“The structurally higher demand for data and fintech services was sustained, with data traffic and fintech transaction volumes increasing by around a third each,” mentioned MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita. 

“To support this, we invested more than R38 billion in our network, IT and platform infrastructure – an increase of 17%, while at the same time reducing consumers’ average cost to communicate by nearly 23%.”

In South Africa, the corporate’s efficiency was strong with growth in service income of three.6% to virtually R41 billion and an EBITDA margin of 39.2%. Loadshedding impacted EBITDA by R695 million as the corporate incurred extra expenditure to satisfy the necessities of energy, safety and repairs, the latter as a result of vandalism of websites.

“With the state of disaster regulations gazetted, South Africa now has a unique opportunity to accelerate efforts to secure the resilience of critical national infrastructure such as telecommunications. Government and business must jointly seize this moment and act decisively to deal with the quadruple crises of energy; logistics; crime and corruption; and youth unemployment. Inaction risks South Africa being a failed nation-state (sic),” added Mupita.