The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Top managers are still engaging the government on its licence renewal
Kampala, Uganda | ISAAC KHISA | MTN Uganda has recorded a 30.5% growth in revenue to Shs765.32bn for the first six months ending June.30 owed to the increase in demand for data and fin-tech services, according to its latest financial results.
The firm’s data earnings nearly doubled from Shs61.6bn to Shs117.8bn whereas fin-tech services revenue grew 17% to Shs183.8bn during the same period under review.
However, digital services revenue declined by about 54% to Shs2.6bn, with capital investment nearly doubling from Shs94bn to Shs162.9bn.
This comes as the company continues to engage the government on its licence renewal which expired last year. Currently, it is operating with a temporary licence from the Uganda Communications Commission.
Currently, MTN Uganda holds about 54% market share for the telecom sector that boasts of eight firms. As at the end of last year, it had about 11.3million subscribers.
At group level, MTN has operations in 16 markets across Africa and the Middle East. In all these markets, its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation rose 10%, while sales also gained 10%.
MTN Nigeria, MTN Ghana, MTN Uganda and MTN South Africa performed better than other markets in the group.
The group’s voice revenue grew by 4.5% to R39.7bn (Shs 9.5trillion), data was up by 19.8% to R16.1bn (Shs 3.8 trillion), fin-tech grew by 30.7% to R4.7bn (Shs1.1trillion) and digital declined by 42.5% to R1.4 billion (Shs334.5bn) as subscribers also increased by 7.7million to 240million.
Enterprise and wholesale grew by 6.8% and 127.9% respectively to R6.5bn (Shs1.5trillion) and R2.6bn (Shs621.2bn). The company’s data revenue expanded by 19.8%, supported by healthy growth in active data users to 82 million as the firm improved the coverage and quality of its data networks.
Across all markets, MTN increased 3G and 4G population coverage by 24.4 million and 32.5 million people respectively. However, the effective rate per megabyte across the markets declined by 26.1%, with average usage up 24.6% at 2.7GB per month.
Meanwhile, fin-tech revenue increased by 30.7% supported by customer growth of 8.9% to 30million active Mobile Money (MoMo) users with monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) of US$1.30 (Shs4, 752).
The total value of transactions in the six months to June was US$44.1 billion (Shs161.2trillion), and the group processed 9,193 transactions per minute.
In May this year, the group unveiled Africa’s first MoMo artificial intelligence service or chatbot in the Ivory Coast market. aYo joint venture insurance business recorded almost 4.2 million registered policy holders across the African footprint including Uganda in the first half.
Group president and CEO, Rob Shuter said the telco delivered encouraging results for the period despite the difficulties in various markets. “South Africa in particular was impacted by a weak economy as well as the implementation of lower out-of-bundle pricing and the new Independent Communications Authority of South Africa subscriber regulations in the first quarter of the year,” he said. “We delivered on several strategic projects including the listings of MTN Nigeria on the Nigerian Stock Exchange and Jumia, our e-commerce venture, on the New York Stock Exchange.” Shuter said the firm remains focused on building its “digital operator strategy, focusing on being a scale player in their evolving telcom services as well as digital and fin-tech and delivering on their planed medium-term targets.
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