MTN South Africa increased the number of post-paid customers on its network in the third quarter of its 2025 financial year, growing the figure by 7.3% year on year to 4.6 million.

The prepaid side of the business painted a different picture entirely, however, with the number of prepaid subscribers declining by 0.4% as competition in the segment “continued to intensify”.

In the quarterly trading update, for the three months to end-September 2025, MTN South Africa reported a mixed bag of results:

Service revenue grew by 2% (prepaid declined by 1.7%);
Data revenue climbed by 5%;
Enterprise revenue growth was good at 12.3%;
Voice revenue declined by 2.8%; and
Fintech revenue declined by 5.1%.

Ebitda – a measure of operating profit – fell by 4.8%, with the Ebitda margin down by 0.4 percentage points to 35.8% (excluding the impact of losses and gains from the disposal of towers).

“MTN South Africa delivered a resilient performance in the first nine months [of the 2025 financial year], amid ongoing intense competitive pressures in the market,” MTN said in commentary with the trading update on Monday.

Total customers increased by 2.1% to 40.1 million.

The growth in post-paid customers was driven by a stronger year-on-year uptake of integrated voice and data plans, device-based offers, and the continued growth of the home broadband users on fixed-wireless access (FWA) services.

Voice revenue remained under pressure, with a decline of 2.8% year on year. “This was mainly due to the lower performance in the consumer prepaid segment, although mitigated by resilience in consumer post-paid, which delivered voice revenue growth of 4.4% notwithstanding ongoing shifts towards voice over IP.”

Data revenue contributed 48.8% to total service revenue in the latest quarter, up from 47.4% in the prior year.

Prepaid focus

“Data consumption continued to rise, with average usage per active post-paid data subscriber rising 13.4% year on year to 24.9GB. This uplift was largely driven by increased adoption of FWA. The average monthly usage per prepaid active data subscriber grew by 27% to 4.1GB, reflecting expanding demand and deeper engagement.”

MTN said it is working to turn around its prepaid business. This includes ongoing product refinement, targeted regional and personalised bundle pricing, and channel optimisation efforts.

“It is anticipated that the prepaid market will remain under pressure in the short term as the business continues to navigate the effects of competitive pressures. MTN South Africa’s service revenue and Ebitda margin are expected to be at the lower end of guidance in the next few quarters,” MTN said.

Read: Telkom on the move as Vodacom and MTN stumble at home

Vodacom last week also said its prepaid business in South Africa was under pressure, with prepaid revenue sliding 1.6% in the six months to end-September 2025 to R13.2-billion. Vodacom blamed economic pressure on consumers and an increasingly competitive market for the declines. Its prepaid base shrank by 7.4% to 39.2 million following a clean-up of inactive users on its books. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media

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