MTN Group on Monday cautioned that competition in South Africa’s telecommunications sector is intensifying.

As a result, the consumer prepaid business in South Africa recorded year-on-year service revenue growth of just 0.8%, with a “slight slowdown” to 0.3% year on year in the final three months of 2024.

“This was largely due to increased competitive intensity in the market as we increased prices in May 2024 and value-seeking customers continued to optimise their spend,” the group said in notes published with its results for the financial year ended 31 December 2024.

However, it wasn’t all bad news, with post-paid growth showing solid growth. There was also an improvement in the decline of legacy voice services, with revenue there falling by 5.5% year on year (from -12.1% in 2023).

“MTN South Africa sustained a resilient overall performance with service revenue growth of 3.1% for the year, underpinned by network availability improvements and commercial initiatives,” the group said.

“While total service revenue moderated slightly to 2.5% in the fourth quarter, largely due to base effects and lower prepaid performance, the business delivered some encouraging acceleration in key commercial metrics in the latter part of the year. Prepaid data returned to growth from November as we began to anniversary (sic) the impact of bundle recovery.”

Subscriber growth

MTN South Africa reported strong subscriber growth, with a 6.4% increase to 39.8 million – a net addition of 2.4 million to its base. Post-paid subscribers (excluding telemetry) increased by 6.1% to 4.3 million, driven by stronger uptake of home propositions as well as integrated voice and data plans. Prepaid customers increased 5.5% to 29.9 million.

Total data revenue rose by 2.9%, with an “encouraging acceleration” in growth to 5.5% in the fourth quarter – and contributed 47.8% to MTN South Africa’s total service revenue. This growth was driven by a 6.8% increase in active data subscribers to 21.8 million, with a year-on-year increase in data traffic of 28.3%.

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Data consumption per active prepaid data subscriber amounted to 3.2GB/month (up 9.5% year on year), while an active post-paid data subscriber’s consumption has increased to 22.5GB/month (up 36.6%) with the bulk of that growth attributed to fixed-wireless access as more customers adopt home internet propositions.

MTN South Africa’s enterprise business continued its turnaround, delivering service revenue growth of 10.8% in 2024.

Wholesale revenue (including incoming voice) declined by 0.4%, with the fourth quarter of 2024 affected by higher revenue recognised for network partner Cell C in the same quarter in 2023. Excluding incoming voice, wholesale revenue declined by 0.9%.

Mobile Money is also showing good growth, albeit off a low base, MTN said.

MTN South Africa’s Ebitda – earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation – rose by 5.1%. “Ebitda, which included a gain resulting from lease terminations, grew ahead of service revenue as MTN South Africa’s concerted expense efficiency initiatives yielded significant benefits,” the group said. Ebitda margin was 1.3 percentage points higher at 37.4%.

“Looking ahead, the local macroeconomic environment appears to be on a stabilising trend. However, the South African economy remains under some pressure given the high levels of unemployment and sluggish GDP growth,” MTN said.

“With the improved trends in the inflation rate and the recent interest rate reductions, there is some optimism on consumers’ ability to increase economic activity. This should support the expected recovery in data performance in the first and second quarters of 2025.

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“Prepaid service revenue growth is expected to remain under pressure in the first quarter. However, MTN South Africa is repositioning its propositions to prepaid customers, with initiatives already implemented from February into early March 2025. These include enhancing regionalised and personalised offers, as well as increased focus in the channels to improve the growth trajectory from the second quarter.” — © 2025 NewsCentral Media

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