MTN records 27% growth in mobile money revenue for Q1 of 2022
Telecom giant, MTN ended the first quarter of this year with some significant growth in its revenue from its mobile money businesses, going up by 27% to hit GHS 515m.
MTN’s growth is coming at the time where there are fears that government’s decision to tax transfers will affect earnings of telcos.
However, the numbers tell a different story as MTN which commands more than 80% of the mobile money market has recorded such huge gains.
Data from the Bank of Ghana indicate that last year, the total number of mobile money transaction witnessed some decline and even early this year.
This was linked to the planned introduction and implementation of e-levy, but MTN’s first quarter result shows that the number of mobile money users even went up by 7.7% to reach 11.7m.
MTN has however stated that to reduce the impact of the e-levy on its consumers for this year, it is planning to reduce the fees charged on transfers that are on the platform by 25%.
It is unclear for now how that will impact on consumers after government applies the 1.5% levy on transactions.
Meanwhile, MTN Ghana recorded a year-on-year growth in profit of 53.7% to GHS 707.4 million in the first quarter of this year.
According to its audited first quarter 2022 Financial Report, it also paid GHS 685 million in direct and indirect taxes to government during the period, representing 29.1% of total revenue.
Mobile subscribers increased by 8.4% to 27.1 million, whilst active data subscribers went up by 14.4% to 12.8 million and active Mobile Money (MoMo) users grew by 7.7% to 11.7 million.
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MTN Ghana delivered a 34.5% year-on-year increase in service revenue driven by growth in voice, data and MoMo.
This growth was underpinned by the continued execution of its Ambition 2025 Strategy and sustained investments of GHS 277 million in capital projects (capex) to support improvements in service quality and the expansion of network capacity and coverage.
“In the quarter, we rolled out 62 2G, 59 3G and 352 4G sites and modernized 301 4G sites which supported the increase in 4G coverage by 1.2pp to 91.8%. We also continued to invest in digitising our customer service and improving the Ayoba super app and the flagship MyMTN app. These efforts, along with our CVM and other customer experience initiatives, helped to grow our subscriber base to 27.1 million”, the statement said.
Voice revenue grew by 16.9% year-on-year to GHS 785 million. The contribution of voice to service revenue declined from 38.5% to 33.4% year-on-year in favour of increased contribution from data.
Active data subscribers grew to 12.8 million and helped drive a 64.4% year-on-year growth in data revenue to GHS 872 million. This was further bolstered by growth in the number of smartphones on the network (+5.8% year-on-year), data traffic (+51.3% year-on-year) and megabytes consumed per active subscriber (+32.3% year-on-year).
MTN Ghana said, “we will continue to execute on our Ambition 2025 strategy to drive growth and efficiencies in the business, as we navigate rising macro environment challenges and prepare for new regulatory developments such as the E-Levy.”
“We maintain our medium-term guidance for service revenue growth of high teens (in percentage terms)”, it added.
