MTN’s 3rd quarter results released yesterday showed a revenue growth of 12.1% to N854 billion ($2.3 billion). The positive trend was mainly driven by increase in voice and data revenues.
Even though the number of subscribers grew slightly by 100,000, from 61.5 m in Q2 to 61.6 million in Q3, it still maintains the lead position in the country.
According to the CEO of MTN Nigeria, Ferdi Moolman; “Our performance was very encouraging, demonstrating the resilience of our business despite a challenging operating environment. We sustained double-digit growth in service revenue led by growth in voice and data revenue. We recorded 61.6 million subscribers, representing a 0.1 million increase QoQ. We were required to undertake a SIM re-registration process, which resulted in a disconnection of around 0.6 million active subscribers, limiting base growth. During the quarter, we focused on the end-to-end optimisation and repositioning of our data offerings.”
“We also changed our pricing strategy, placing us in an even stronger competitive position going forward. As a result, we have begun to see promising results with active data subscriber net additions of 1.6 million and 4G population coverage at over 35 percent in 64 cities. Data traffic volume also increased by over 68 percent, while data revenue rose by 34.9 percent yoy,” Moolman said.
Speaking on the significant increase in service revenues, Moolman said: “Voice remains a key contributor to service revenue at 73.5 percent (Q3 2018: 74.8percent), with its growth supported by an increase in subscribers, relatively stable tariffs and our targeted segment offerings using our customer value management toolkit. Data contributed 18.0 percent (Q3 2018: 15.0 percent) to service revenue, with strong growth attributable to the recent data price revamp, consumer education and improved 4G coverage after we obtained access to the 800MHz spectrum in Q2 2019. “
“We recorded a significant increase in both active data users and the number of smartphones on our network, which resulted in higher data usage. We added 1.6 million smartphones on our network, increasing smartphone penetration to 41.7 percent. The number of active data subscribers increased by 7.6 percent to 22.3 million, driving data traffic growth of 68.9 percent.”
MTN listed its stock of 20,354,513,050 ordinary shares by Introduction on the Premium Board of The Nigerian Stock Exchange on, Thursday, 16 May 2019.
It currently operates in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East.
