- Total subs now 262 million
- Nigeria, Ghana, SA lift financials
MTN Group outlined plans to exit the Middle East and focus its attentions solely on Africa as it revealed H1 numbers.
Outoging CEO Rob Shuter, who is heading for a role with BT, announced in an earnings statement MTN decided it was best served by focusing on its pan-Africa strategy, leading to an exit from the Middle East “in an orderly manner over the medium term”.
He added that as a first step, it had entered into advanced discussions with TeleInvest to sell its 75 per cent stake in MTN Syria. TeleInvest owns the other 25 per cent stake in the operator.
MTN will initially also look to sell its operations in Yemen and Afghanistan, before offloading its 49 per cent stake in MTN Irancell. It noted the Middle East assets contributed less than 4 per cent to EBITDA in H1.
Turning to MTN’s overall performance in the first half of the financial year, Shuter says the operator added 11 million subscribers to reach a total base of 262 million, which, he says, was inspired by the group’s belief that everyone deserves the benefits of a modern connected life.
It said growth was down to strong performances in Ghana, Nigeria and home market South Africa, which “reported a pleasing turnaround in underlying consumer and enterprise business units”.
By end-June 2020, MTN had 102 million active data users and 38 million active Mobile Money users. Shuter also says despite lockdown restrictions impacting network rollout, “MTN Group invested R10 billion in capital expenditure across our markets and brought a further 54 million people into 3G and 4G coverage. The focus on affordability of data saw the average rate per megabyte reduced by 34 per cent.”
Addressing MTN matters related to the telco’s asset realisation programme, Shuter says the group made progress and concluded the disposal of the tower company investments in Ghana and Uganda for R8.8 billion.
MTN announced its asset realisation programme in March 2019, which the company says aims to simplify its portfolio, reduce debt and risk, improve returns and realise proceeds of at least R15 billion over three years.
In the period under review, MTN did not declare an interim dividend, citing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shuter says MTN will consider a final dividend should conditions warrant such a move.
“While we expect the remainder of the year to be shaped by the ongoing challenges presented by the pandemic, we believe that MTN will remain comparatively resilient and is poised to sustain its growth over the medium term.”
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