MTN’s Ghana business expects to grow its customer base through increased adoption of its Ayoba super app, growth in the mobile money business and improving customer service and experience for its users, as the unit saw its earnings jump by a third in year to end-December 2021.
MTN Ghana is the group’s third-biggest market by revenue, after Nigeria and SA, accounting for roughly a tenth of earnings.
“In 2022, our areas of focus include improving customer experience across all services and regions to further enhance subscriber growth,” the company said on Tuesday.
MTN plans to extend grow its market share in Ghana's 4G market by implementing the fourth generation of communications technologies available at all its networking sites. In addition, it aims to scale up efforts for the Ayoba super app and MyMTN offering.
“Mobile Money ecosystem expansion will also be a key focus for us through innovations in advanced services and a focus on deepening the penetration of MoMo users within the base.”
This comes as MTN Ghana reported service revenue grew by 28.5% to 7.701bn Ghanaian Cedi (R17.48bn) for the year. The company said this was driven by increased investment in its network “and commercial initiatives which resulted in growth of our customer base and usage across our core business.”
MTN Ghana noted the continued slowing rate of growth in the voice business, saying this was largely in line with expectations and due to the shift in customer behaviour towards data services. As such, the contribution of voice to service revenue declined from 41.8% to 34.1% year on year, with increased contributions from data and mobile money.
Looking ahead, “we forecast service revenue growth in the high teens over the medium-term from the previous guidance of 13% to 15%”, said the company.
During the period, mobile subscribers increased 3.9% to 25.4-million for the period, while active data subscribers grew 15.3% to 12.4-million.
Mobile money users increased 3.8% to 11-million.
Capital expenditure for the period stood at 1.485bn Ghanaian Cedi, spent mainly on expanding the operator's network coverage, rolling out just under 1,700 new network sites for 2G, 3G and 4G services, while upgrading 2,121 existing ones.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebidta) increased by 33.7% to 4.249bn Ghanaian Cedi.
The unit has proposed a final dividend of 0.085 Ghanaian Cedi per share.
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. As economies are continuing to open up, continue to benefit from this momentum.
By the JSE’s close on Monday MTN’s share price was up 3.17% to R197.68, bringing its gains for 2022 to almost 16%. It has a market capitalisation of R355.6bn, R100bn ahead of rival Vodacom.
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.