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MTN have had a cracking year. The share price has more than doubled from R62 at the beginning of January to R128 today. Unfortunately, they still have a long way to go to reach the R249 a share they got to in September 2014. Nonetheless, the trajectory seems to have changed for the good.
Yesterday MTN released interim results for the first half of the year. Revenues grew to R84.1bn from R72.5bn and operating profit jumped to R23.3bn from R15.4bn. This resulted in earnings per share more than doubling to R4.30 from R1.95 last year.
Last week MTN released their quarterly update for the period ending 31 March. The share has been battered this year due to a weak oil price. The company has significant operations in Nigeria and Iran, two countries that rely on oil production. Looking at high level numbers, they added 6.6 million customers - taking their customer base to 257 million, revenue grew 11% and their EBITDA profit margins expanded. Looking at a country level, most operating regions saw double-digit revenue growth; unfortunately MTN SA saw revenue go backwards by 6.2%. Part of the reason for the drop in local revenue is due to a change in their roaming agreement with Cell C.
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.
In mid-January, MTN announced that it had settled a major matter in Nigeria, relating to $2-billion in back taxes. This crisis, one of many in that country, went back to September 2018, when the Attorney General of Nigeria made a number of spurious (in my view) claims about MTN Nigeria's historical financial accounts and tax contributions. At its root, the matter is fuelled by local interests in Nigeria, that view MTN as a foreign group that makes "too much money".
As many would have seen yesterday, the Competition Commission of South Africa (CCSA) released a report criticising the mobile operators in South African for high data prices. You can read the final report here - Data services market inquiry, and this is what Vodacom and MTN had to say in response to the report - 'Wrong' to blame operators for data prices not falling faster.
On Thursday MTN released results for the 6-month period ending 30 June 2019. Here are the highlights.
One of our biggest draw cards to invest in MTN was their ability to sell on various services to their 220 million clients. Financial services in particular.
MTN released their quarterly update for the period ending 31 March 2019. The group increased the total number of subscribers by 4 million to 236.6 million. Active data subscribers also increased by 2.6 million to a total of 81.3 million. While MoMo (mobile money) customers sit at 28.3 million.
As you know, African e-commerce company Jumia soared on its listing in New York. That is great news. But it is key that the share price holds its value over the next few days. Remember Lyft had a good listing but then gave back its early gains (and more) over the next few trading sessions.
Yesterday it was officially announced that MTN backed Jumia has filed for an IPO in New York. The IPO could value the company at a solid $1.6bn. That puts it in line with Dischem, Resilient and Tsogo Sun. In case you forgot, Jumia is an online retailer with over 4 million users, predominantly in Nigeria.
Last week MTN released their full-year numbers, shooting the stock up 15%. Going into these results, the market wasn't expecting much from the group, especially given that the stock fell significantly a few days earlier when they released their trading update. Here is the first slide from the results presentation, showing the numbers that the group is most proud of.
With all the legal issues that MTN has been through over the last two years, we sometimes forget the scope of their operations. The MTN group has exposure to a number of tech businesses, for example they own a stake in Irans equivalent to Uber.
Yesterday MTN released a trading statement for the full year ending 31 December. The company expects an improvement of at least 20% in headline earnings per share. Having said that, the comparable period still had some Nigerian fine influence as well as hyperinflation in Nigeria.
High-speed mobile communication networks are the infrastructure that underpins the connected way we now live. In that world, the move from 4G/LTE networks to 5G is the next big thing.