MTN revenue, customer growth recover

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | MTN Uganda reports a 16.1 percent growth in revenues to 2.63 trillion shillings for the year 2023.

Most of the revenues, (1.12 trillion) still came from voice services which grew by 11.6 percent, while the fastest growing segment was revenue from the use of data.

It maintained its position as the fastest-growing segment at 21.6 percent, returning a total of 621.9 billion shillings.

Voice revenue were boosted by the end-of-year festivities especially due to increased growth in voice traffic, as well as the optimisation of the bundle offering.  During that specific period, growth shot up by 15.2 percent.

The other significant revenue source was Fintech (basically mobile money services) which fetched 771.6 billion shillings which is a growth of 17.6 percent.

Richard Yego, the Managing Director, of MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited said, “MTN MoMo Pay remains very paramount, it was one of our key focus areas of 2023.

The transaction value has more than doubled and this has led to increased revenue.”The company’s audited financial results show that profit after tax grew by 21.4 percent to 493 billion, and the company was able to pay dividends to shareholders, amounting to 403 billion shillings at 18 per share.

By the end of the year, MTN’s customer base had grown by 13.3 percent to 19.5 percent, according to the statements.

The share of voice as a contribution to total revenues continued to decline, going down to 42.5 percent compared to 44.2 percent in the previous year.

On the other hand, the high growth in data revenues was mainly due to improved smartphone penetration, which stood at 39.1 percent. The company says that most of the traffic (two-thirds) was carried on the 4G network up from half the previous year.

The company expects more growth in 2024 in line with the expected growth in the country’s GDP of 5 percent.

It also promises to achieve a geographical coverage of 90 percent of the country by 2025 as per the Nation Operators’ License provisions.

“One of our key milestones achieved in the year was the improvement of our network efficiency through the additional spectrum secured,” said Sylvia Mulinge, the Chief Executive Officer.

She also hoped that they would sell another 7 percent shares to the public this year.  On the November 2023 directive by the Uganda Communications Commission to deactivate customers who were not fully registered, the company says less than 1 percent of the subscribers were affected.

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