MTN has reported an after-tax profit of R10.4 billion for the first six months of its financial year across the group — an increase of 149% compared to last year’s results.
After considering adjustments such as profits from selling its towers in South Africa, impairments, and foreign exchange effects, MTN’s profit was R14.4 billion — a 35.5% increase compared to last year’s adjusted figure.
The company reported a 5.6% increase in subscribers to 281.6 million and a 14.8% service revenue growth.
In South Africa, MTN’s service revenue increased by 4.1%, driven by data revenue that was up 14.6%.
MTN SA reported subscriber growth of 8.9% to 35.3 million customers, a net addition of almost 837,000 in the quarter.
MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita said the company achieved these results despite challenging global and regional macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions.
“Rising energy and food prices, general inflation and interest rate conditions has put pressures on disposable incomes, operating and capital expenditure,” Mupita stated.
“The conflict in Ukraine and China’s ‘zero-COVID’ policy have impacted supply chains and to mitigate risk, we accelerated capital expenditure in some of our key markets, such as Nigeria and Ghana.”
MTN said that in the current macroeconomic context, its South African operation’s performance was enabled by its focus on commercial and operational execution across all business units.
Mupita explained that there are many different accounting methodologies and reporting profit and loss.
Therefore, as a management team, they focus on headline earnings per share.
MTN reported headline earnings of R5.67 per share, a 46.5% increase.
He also said that this level of growth has allowed MTN to make strategic investments while their competitors have been quite cautious.
MTN reported capital expenditure of R28.3 billion for the first half of the year, with its South African network making up R9.6 billion of that investment.
“We remain confident about medium to long-term performance [and will continue investing],” Mupita said.