Africa’s largest mobile operator MTN, says its Ghanaian unit saw data usage rise by more than half in its six months to end-June, boosted by an ongoing network expansion plan.
MTN Ghana’s service revenue grew 25.5% to 3.61-billion cedi (R8.8bn) to end-June, but subscribers decreased by 0.5% to 24.9-million.
As part of its network expansion plan, MTN Ghana rolled out 123 2G, 120 3G and 802 4G sites and modernised 1,007 existing sites to 4G sites to end-June.
“This investment helped spur data traffic growth of 53.2% and enabled us to reach a total of 2,677 4G sites nationwide, resulting in an increase in our 4G population coverage to 79.9% from 76.1%,” it said in a statement.
MTN Ghana is the group’s third-biggest market by revenue, after Nigeria and SA, and it brought just under 10% of earnings in the group’s year to end-December.
MTN, which has about 280-million subscribers across 21 markets in Africa and the Middle East, is busy with its Ambition 2025 strategy, which is based on deepening its footprint in Africa after exiting the Middle East.
Covid-19 has also provided a boost for mobile operators, keeping customers at home and forcing them to turn to digital channels for work, education or entertainment.
MTN Ghana said its expects the remainder of 2021 to be influenced by the extent of economic recovery and the progress in the vaccination rollout. The projected growth for the Ghanaian economy, per the 2021 Ghana budget, is 5%.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.