MTN FY Numbers - Dividend Raised

MTN released a good set of full-year numbers yesterday, thanks to great improvements in some of their businesses units. As Paul mentioned a few weeks ago, MTN Nigeria has toned down its fight with the Nigerian regulatory authorities. That will definitely help MTN to focus more on operational excellence in their largest market.

MTN's group service revenues grew by 9.8% to R141.8 billion in constant currencies, after adding 18.2 million new subscribers. MTN Ghana showed exceptional performance as it grew by 22.9%, followed by MTN Nigeria which grew by 12.6%. The overall group growth in data revenues was 22.4% to R35.1 billion, while Fintech revenues grew by 27% to R10.1 billion. By the end of December, the mobile operator had 251 million total subscribers in their network. That's just over a quarter of a billion people!

The home market, South Africa, was a little disappointing as subscribers went backwards from 31.2 million to 28.9 million. We saw negligible services revenue growth of just 0.4%. This is due to a lot of competition on pricing and promotions by all local networks. If it's any consolation, these problems sent debt laden CellC to an early grave.

MTN Ghana grew its subscribers by 12.3% to 22.6 million, with data revenues growing at 32.5%.It would be very interesting to find out how much impact the 1.8 million odd people who visited Ghana for The Year of the Return event (me included) contributed to this growth. Remember Ghana is now the blueprint for MTN's Mobile Money (MoMo) business, where MoMo contributes 18.6% to services revenues thanks to 15.1 million registered MoMo clients.

MTNs share price of just R62.80 doesn't really reflect the true value of the mobile network giant, in my opinion. Keep in mind that the company continues to ease its debt burden and improve its network by investing back into the different markets they operate in. This will help the company benefit from the wave of increased use of mobile phones which drives more data usage/traffic.

CEO Rob Shuter announced that he will not be seeking to renew his contract after it ends in 2021, giving the board enough time to find his successor. He inherited a very hard job at MTN and he prevailed, successfully negotiating with Nigerian authorities. Operationally, he has improved the company in many ways. He will be missed!