MTN Ghana, the only significant market power (SMP) in the industry, has declared impressive growth in revenue and pre-tax profit for the first half of the year 2023.
This is in spite of the very harsh operating environment, both at local and global levels, which saw major telcos on the continent, such as MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa recording decline in profits same period.
Beside having to disconnect 5.4 million SIM card at the May this year, the company is also faced with SMP constraints, huge inflation rate, rising utility cost, spectrum renewal cost among other, which it had to surmount to post the impressive H1 results.
For the period under review, ending June 30, 2023, MTN Ghana recorded a pre-tax profit of GHS2.44 billion (over $213 million), which is a significant 45% plus higher than the GHS1.68 billion achieved in the first half of 2022.
Total revenue for the period also surged to GHS6.18 billion, up from GHS4.67 billion in the previous year, representing a 32.3% growth, year-on-year.
Additionally, the company’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) also improved, reaching GHS3.47 billion, up about 29.5% from GHS2.68 billion in the same period last year.
MTN Ghana’s exceptional performance was on the back of remarkable growth in voice, data, and Mobile Money revenue, which has resulted in the company revising its medium-term guidance upwards, expecting well over 20 percentage growth in service revenue.
Per the report, data revenue reached GHS2.6 billion, which is 41% higher than what it was in the same period last year; voice revenue also saw a 14.4% growth year-on-year, reaching GHS1.7 billion. while mobile money revenue saw the highest percentage growth – 48.8% over that of the previous year to reach GHS1.3 billion.
The company attributed its outstanding performance to the expansion of network capacity and coverage, along with improvements in IT systems and service delivery.
These factors, according to MTN, have supported the usage of the company’s services by its 27.3 million subscribers across Ghana.
The growth in data revenue was particularly attributed to an increase in active users, growth in data traffic, and effective price revisions. The increase in active users was due to new SIM acquisition on more smart devices as opposed to deactivated SIMs, most of which were in feature phones.
Mobile money revenue growth on the other hand, was supported by cash-out revenue and advanced services revenue. It is worthy of note that MTN attempted to increase cash out fees recently by had to suspend it until further notice.
Meanwhile, MTN Ghana’s digital revenue continues to decline, recording a further 22.1% dip over that of the same period 2022, to reach about GHS63.3 million.
Selorm Adadevoh – MTN Ghana CEO
According to the CEO, Selorm Adadevoh, the consistent drop in digital revenue since last year was due to a deliberate clean up of its value-added services (VAS) platform following several customers complaints and media reportage about hidden subscriptions causing customers’ airtime to vanish.
He said MTN has even started engaging customers and assisting them to sign out of subscriptions they did not sign up to, adding that the company is also rolling out more innovative digital content to excite customers and shore up its digital revenue in the second half of the year.
“MTN Ghana is executing portfolio rationalization initiatives to enhance digital services and aims to return to positive growth in digital revenues by 2024,” he noted.
Even though, this is just half year, MTN Ghana has already spent GHS1.5 billion out of the GHS2.4 billion capex (capital expenditure) it earmarked for the year, and according to the CEO, its spending has always focused on readying the company for 5G rollout because they are confident that will happen soon.
