The MTN Group has reported an 11.9% increase in service revenue of up to R170 billion in its 2020 financial year results. MTN says the positive revenue results were supported by growth across all its operations in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon.
The group says R1.8 billion in COVID-19 support measures was given back to communities in the first three months of last year.
MTN says it has seen its subscription numbers increase by 28 million to nearly 280 million.
The MTN Group reported that revenue was boosted by a 4,8% in voice revenue to R92 billion, data expanded by 31% to R48 billion and fintech grew by nearly 24% to R13 billion.
MTN CEO Ralph Mupita says the group is encouraged by its full-year results which were achieved under a challenging economic period.
“The big driver for our results there was the surge in data and data traffic. We experienced across our operation a 100% increase in data traffic during the COVID year of last year and we saw a very strong performance in data revenue which was up by 31%.”
Mupita says R1,8 billion in COVID-19 support measures was given back to communities. The group reported 1 404 COVID-19 infections and 10 deaths across all its markets.
“At the social end, without yellow initiative, we were able to support communities more broadly by zero-rating some of our services, SMS’s in particular. The total value of that support to our communities more broadly, we estimate at about R1.8 billion that we gave back into societies to help them cope with COVID, particularly in the first three quarters of the year.”
Mupita says the board anticipates paying a total ordinary dividend of at least 260 cents a share for the 2021 financial year. He says this will be a final dividend, with no interim dividend during the 2021 financial year.
“And so, we wanted to be super clear to our investors that if the year goes much better than we thought, the 260 is a minimum and the board will apply its mind towards a special dividend on top of that, ordinary dividend or share buybacks as we close our financial year 2021. We remain guided by capital allocation framework which I will remind investor on.”
MTN reported that return on equity advanced by a further 4 percentage points to 17%, while cash-flows remain resilient at R40 billion.
