MTN Group has announced positive results in the first half of 2022 with service revenue growing 14.8% to R92.5 billion ($5.7 billion).
The Group’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) increased by 15.1% to R43.9 billion ($2.7 billion) before once-off items with the EBITDA margin expanding by 0.3 percentage points to 45.3%.
MTN said the strong results were supported by the focused execution of the company’s expense efficiency programme.
Ralph Mupita, President and CEO at MTN Group said, “Growth in data revenue was particularly strong, up 35.9%, driven by MTN Nigeria, MTN Ghana, MTN Cameroon and MTN South Africa.” He added that fintech revenue grew by 14.0%, with solid performances from Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana.
“The introduction of fintech taxes in some markets slowed revenue growth in Q2, but we remain encouraged by the ecosystem growth as users, agents and merchants continued to grow healthily during the period under review, with transaction volumes growing by 31.5% during the period,” explained Mupita.
As part of the company’s Ambition 2025 programme, MTN announced that it is building five scale platform businesses on top of a very strong connectivity network, with the fintech platform having been seen as the most mature of these.
In the first half of 2022 the fintech division had 60.7 million Mobile Money users (up 24% year-on-year), generating six billion transactions worth $116.3 billion.
The total number of MTN subscribers in the period was 281.6 million, up 5.6%.
MTN said it made progress in its work to separate fintech and fibre businesses from the GSM business and has started the process of engagement with select potential strategic investors into the Group Fintech structure.
The company says the outcome should be concluded by the end of the year.
