MTN’s South African shareholders are about to receive their biggest dividend in years, with the telecom giant declaring R5 ($0.30) per share for 2025, up 45% from the previous year and well above the board’s own forecast of R3.70 ($0.22).
The windfall comes off a striking group-wide turnaround. MTN Group, Africa’s largest telco, swung from a R10.9 billion ($652 million) loss in 2024 to a R27.4 billion ($1.64 billion) profit after tax in 2025, driven by a 22.9% rise in service revenue to R218.5 billion ($13 billion) and expense efficiencies of R3.6 billion ($215 million).
Data was the engine
Over 172.6 million active data customers consumed an average of 12.5 gigabytes (GB) each, pushing total data traffic up 27% to 24.7 petabytes (PB) across the network. MTN’s mobile money arm, MoMo, processed over $500 billion in transaction value, up 15% in volumes.
The more interesting story, though, is the geography of that growth. MTN Nigeria, long the group’s largest market by subscribers, posted 54.9% revenue growth in 2025 and has now overtaken MTN South Africa as the group’s most consequential profit centre.
Nigeria’s recovery was powered by the naira’s stabilisation after years of devaluation that had wiped significant value off its reported earnings. Aggressive data adoption and telecom tariff increases also pushed the subsidiary’s earnings as more Nigerians increased their online spending.
MTN South Africa, by contrast, grew service revenue by just 2%, hampered by a tough prepaid market and slow economic conditions.
For retail investors, the dividend is the headline, but the structural shift is the real news: MTN’s upside now depends more on how Nigeria, Ghana and other high-growth markets perform than on its home turf.
Ghana
Meanwhile, MTN’s Ghana business was another standout performer, with 35.9% growth to reach R40.9 billion (US$2.44 billion), coming close to MTN South Africa’s service revenue of R44.03 billion (US$2.6 billion).
So if South Africans are getting US$0.30 on the back of just a 2% growth in service revenue in 2025, then Ghanaian shareholders can expect a much bigger share of the cake on the back of almost 36% growth in service revenue.
MTN Ghana has scheduled its 8th Annual General Meeting for shareholders on March 24, 2026.
