MTN South Africa has delivered a reasonably good set of results for the six months to 30 June 2024, despite the moribund economy in which it is operating.

Service revenue for the first half of the year climbed by 3.3%, supported by strong performances in enterprise sales and fintech. Ebitda, or earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation – a measure of operating profit – climbed by 3.8%, or 4.3% excluding the gain on the disposal of telecommunications towers.

“MTN South Africa, which completed its network resilience plan in the period, demonstrated encouraging progress in key areas of the business. This helped to drive some acceleration in overall service revenue,” said MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita.

Ebitda margin expanded to 36.6%, up by 0.4 percentage points year on year, while capital expenditure came in at R4.6-billion, which included the final three months of the network resilience programme aimed at ensuring MTN’s network remained mostly available during load shedding.

Service revenue matched the improvement in Ebitda – a gain of 3.3% — while data revenue growth was relatively muted at 2.4%, despite a big jump in data consumption by MTN customers. Outgoing voice revenue fell by 5.5%.

MTN South Africa grew its subscriber numbers by 4.7%, reaching 38.5 million at the end of June. Post-paid subscribers grew by 9.2% to 9.4 million, driven by stronger uptake of integrated voice and data plans as well as home broadband propositions. Prepaid customers increased by 3.3% to 29 million.

Data traffic

Although data revenue growth was just 2.4%, contributing 47.6% of service revenue, data traffic rose by 36.5%, with post-paid customers now consuming on average 21.6GB/month (up 51% year to date), driven higher by fixed-wireless access products.

However, the biggest bright spot in the MTN South Africa numbers came from its fintech business, where service revenue jumped by 59.1% in the first half. This was underpinned by airtime advance initiatives.

“Notwithstanding a decline in monthly active users as a result of a base clean-up, MoMo (mobile money) revenue scaled rapidly from a low base and more than doubled in the period. This was driven by the ongoing expansion of the product portfolio, including insurance and lending services (personal and micro loans),” MTN said.

Fintech revenue contributed 4.1% to total service revenue, up from 2.6% in the first half of 2023.

The digital business delivered growth of 10.2%, driven by a 26.1% growth in new content subscriptions and 32.3% growth in mobile advertising. MTN South Africa has signed exclusivity deals with Showmax EPL and Disney+, which has assisted in customer acquisition and retention, it said. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media