MTN Nigeria Communications Plc (MTN Nigeria) announced its unaudited results for the half-year ended 30 June 2022. Mobile subscribers increased by 7.6 million to 74.1 million, reflecting a pleasing acceleration in the run-rate of monthly net additions during Q2. Active data subscribers increased by 13.2% to 36.8 million supported by the data growth initiatives. As for fintech, subscribers rose by 87.3% to 11.5 million, and service revenue was up by 19.9% to N947.9 billion. Additionally, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) grew by 22.1% to N509.3 billion.
EBITDA margin improved by 0.9 percentage points (pp) to 53.6%; also, the capital expenditure (CAPEX) rose by 67.1% to N311.6 billion, and the dividend per share of N5.60 kobo went up 23.1%. Profit before tax (PBT) increased by 24.9% while the Profit after tax (PAT) grew by 28.1% despite the 18.7% increase in taxation. Also, Earnings per share (EPS) augmented by 28.1% to N8.92 kobo
Commenting on the results, MTN Nigeria CEO, Karl Toriola commented, “During the first half of 2022, we made good progress in strengthening the resilience of the business in the face of our increasingly challenging operating environment with rising energy, food, and general inflation putting pressure on consumer spending. The conflict in Ukraine as well as the implementation of a “zero-COVID” policy in China, has also put a strain on global supply chains. In addition, having acquired one lot of 100MHz in the 3.5GHz spectrum band from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), we are on track to launch 5G services across the country in Q3 2022.”
Outlook
The business continues to face some strong headwinds such as rising general inflation, paucity of foreign exchange, supply chain disruptions and higher diesel and petrol prices, which places more financial pressures on customers as well as the business at large. However, MTN Nigeria remains focused on building on the solid foundation of growth that has been laid thus far, and will continue to ramp up gross connections to grow its subscriber base, thus offsetting the impact of the expected increase in churn in Q3 2022.
