South Africa-based regional carrier MTN Group reported revenues of ZAR97.491 billion (USD5.94 billion) for the first six months of this year, representing a 12% increase from the figure of ZAR86.673 billion recorded in 6M21, as pre-tax profits surged to ZAR18.578 billion from ZAR10.238 billion and net profit (attributable to shareholders) soared to ZAR8.037 billion from ZAR2.673 billion. Additionally, IFRS reported EBITDA increased by 13.7% year-on-year with an EBITDA margin of 45.3% (up 0.5pp on an annualised basis). The Group noted that CAPEX of ZAR28.3 billion in 6M22 helped to drive MTN’s consolidated subscription base in its 19 markets of operation up 5.6% to 281.6 million, while active mobile money (MoMo) users climbed 24.0% y-o-y to 60.7 million; value of MoMo transactions was up 1.0% at USD116.3 billion. MTN noted that the solid uptake in mobile subscriptions came despite the impact of SIM registration regulations in NIgeria, as MTN Nigeria ‘accelerated gross connections’. The Group is confident that its ‘various mitigating actions will recover the base, in line with our broad expectations for the 2022 financial year’.
Commenting on the Group’s performance, MTN President and CEO Ralph Mupita said: ‘During the first half of 2022, we delivered a solid performance under challenging global and regional macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions. Rising energy and food prices, general inflation and interest rate conditions has put pressures on disposable incomes, operating and capital expenditure. The conflict in Ukraine and China’s “zero-COVID” policy have impacted supply chains and to mitigate risk, we accelerated capital expenditure in some of our key markets, such as Nigeria and Ghana. In addition to the macroeconomic challenges, in South Africa, power supply constraints from loadshedding affected network availability. In South Africa, we generally target above 99% network availability and in a month like June 2022 where loadshedding reached stage 6, network availability averaged 89%. In Nigeria our Q2 performance was impacted by the NIN-SIM linkage directive where 19 million subscribers’ outgoing voice service was restricted. New fintech taxes and levies were introduced in several markets that impacted transaction value generated and revenue growth in the period.’