MTN Group subscribers declined marginally by 0.7% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to 230.2 million, largely driven by lower reported subscribers in Nigeria as we continue to refine our active subscriber definitions as well as the disconnection of approximately 750 000 subscribers in Uganda as a result of regulatory SIM registration requirements.
Active MTN Mobile Money customers increased QoQ by 10,6% to 19.8 million, while voice traffic (billable minutes) increased by 9% and data traffic continued to grow strongly up by some 125% year-on-year.
On a reported basis Group total revenue and group service revenue reduced by 13.4% and 14.0% respectively largely due to exchange rate movements.
On a constant currency basis Group total revenue increased by 6.9%, with group service revenue up 7.4%. Data revenue increased by 31.4% and digital revenue was up 19.6%.
MTN South Africa’s organic service revenue increased by 5,2%, MTN Nigeria reported an 11.2% increase in total revenue supported by data revenue growth of 72.1%, MTN Irancell total revenue increased by 16.8% and MTN Group year-to-date capital expenditure was ZAR18 billion, up 1.1%.
MTN Group President and Chief Executive Officer, Rob Shuter comments:
“The Group continued to make steady progress in implementing our BRIGHT strategy with a strong focus on operational execution across the group. Our key growth drivers of data and digital services performed well with revenue growth of 31.4% and 19.6% respectively. In the quarter, we have accelerated our network investment programme, rolling out 1 641 3G and 2 102 4G sites (including co-located sites), supporting the demand for data services. In South Africa and Nigeria the network investments are showing encouraging improvements in network quality and NPS,” says Rob Shuter, MTN Group President and Chief Executive Officer.
“In South Africa the prepaid business performed well and progress is being made in the postpaid segment particularly in consumer post-paid where we now have positive net-adds year to date. In Nigeria, our month on month gross connections have increased, and we experienced stable subscriber market share over the quarter while driving increased value share.”
“In line with our strategic initiative to drive a dual-data strategy, we are working on reducing the out-of-bundle data pricing across our markets to stimulate data usage from inactive and low usage customers. This is expected to have a short-term impact on data revenue growth but we anticipate elasticity in the mass and high value segments will continue to drive data revenue growth in the medium-term.
“We further strengthened our management structure to support our BRIGHT strategy. The appointment of Ebenezer Asante as Vice President (VP) of our new South and East Africa and Ghana Region, effective 1 October 2017 completes the group executive structure. Ebenezer was previously the Chief Executive Officer of MTN Ghana, a position he held from July 2015 to September 2017.
MTN Group senior appointments
- Fred Scheppens as Group Executive: MTN GlobalConnect, effective 15 October 2017;
- Dirk Karl as Group Executive: Procurement and Supply Chain Management, effective 1 October 2017;
- Serigne Dioum as Group Executive: Mobile Financial Services, effective 26 September 2017; and
- Ankur Bajpai as Group Executive: Customer Value Management, effective 1 September 2017.
“We continue to work on the modernisation of our subscriber definitions which we expect to complete by year-end,” says Shuter.
“We remain on track to meet our financial year 2017 guidance despite continued challenging economic growth across our markets.”