Africa’s largest telecoms company MTN Group has said that it has succeeded in taking market share from its major rivals in South Africa. This comes as MTN Group’s latest quarterly results show that its South African operation has taken market share from rivals, pointing to customer numbers that rose 8.1% year on year.
MTN South Africa’s subscriber base reached 35.9 million in the period ended 30 September 2022.
Service revenue growth, at 3.5%, was less robust, however, with the weak economy and load shedding, as well as “revenue concessions” to support the recapitalisation of roaming partner Cell C, having an impact. Prepaid service revenue rose by only 0.4%.
However, the South African business’s enterprise (business) segment showed strong service revenue growth of 19.7%.
“Amid unprecedented load shedding, which negatively affected network availability, MTN South Africa expanded market share, delivered encouraging underlying service revenue growth, strong expense controls, and investment in network resilience and expanding the 5G coverage,” said MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita in a statement.
Mupita warned, however, that persistent load shedding in the last quarter of the year (October to December) “could impact revenue growth, particularly in the consumer prepaid market”.
Total MTN Group subscribers increased by 6.8% year on year to 285 million, while its fintech business’s customer base rose by 23.3% to 63 million and fintech transaction volumes increased by a third to 9.5 billion.
The group reported a 14.3% increase in service revenue (in constant currency terms) to R144-bilion; the Ebitda profit margin, a measure of operational profitability, rose to 45.3%.