MTN Group has posted a $5.55 billion service revenue in H1 2021, representing a 2.1% growth, attributed to the strong growth of 25.5% in Ghana, 23.8% in Nigeria and 9.3% in South Africa.
The biggest drivers of revenues were the fintech and data segments. According to the results, fintech rose by 39.7%, with the number of active users on MoMo, MTN payment system platform, increasing by 2.6 million to 48.9 million compared to December last year, generating a monthly average revenue of $1.3 per user. The value of MoMo transactions grew by 88.3% to $115.2 billion, with 17,292 transactions processed per minute.
Data expanded by 32.2% on the back of a 56% increase in data usage to 0.9GB per user per month. Furthermore, the period under review saw 3.1 million new data users, bringing the total number to 117.4 million.
Voice revenue grew by 8.9%, supported by growth in voice traffic of 12.3% year-on-year.
However, MTN announced a 10% decline in reported headline earning per share (HEPS) — the main profit measure in South Africa —, falling from 430 cents in the same period in 2020, to 387 cents per share.
According to company executives, the decline in HEPS was due to “many non-operational” and “one-off items”, referring to the impairment losses suffered in the company exiting Syria by abandonment.
The Group further suffered a 2.3 million decline in the number of subscribers, ending the period under review at 277.3 million. This resulted from new industry-wide Sim registration regulations in Nigeria — MTN’s largest market with 37 million customers.
Because of the new regulations, new Sim cards added to its tally in Nigeria remained muted, but the Group’s subscribers elsewhere in the 21 markets grew by 5.4 million.
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