MTN published its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2021 on Thursday, showing good growth in South Africa while slashing their data price package.

Service revenue increased by 9.3%. This was driven by an increase in data revenue of 12.3%.

MTN’s financial technology revenue increased by 6.4%. and its digital revenue increased by 28.6%.

The company reported “healthy and sustained growth” in its prepaid and postpaid consumer business units, enterprise business unit, and its wholesale business.

“The 9.3% growth in service revenue exceeded our medium-term target,” MTN said.

Broken down by business unit, MTN’s revenue growth was as follows:

Prepaid — 4.0%

Postpaid — 7.3%

Enterprise — 14.1%

Wholesale — 62.4%

MTN reported increasing its subscriber base in South Africa by around 665,000 to 32.7 million.

This was driven by an increase of around 506,000 in postpaid subscribers to 7.3 million, which recovered well amid less-stringent lockdown restrictions, more data value offers, and advanced churn management.

This growth comes after MTN’s postpaid subscriber base benefited from short-term university and college deals offered to support students during the height of the Covid–19 restrictions in June 2020.

During the first half of 2021, prepaid customers in South Africa increased by about 159,000 to 25.4 million supported by growth in 4G data customers.

Across MTN Group’s operations in Africa and the Middle East, service revenue grew by 2.1% and subscribers decreased by 2.3 million.

MTN said that the decrease in subscribers was due to new industry-wide SIM registration regulations in Nigeria.

These new regulations included a ban on new SIM activations, which was lifted in April 2021.

New additions in Nigeria have since remained muted, as expected, owing to the new registration requirements.

Excluding Nigeria, MTN Group subscribers increased by 5.4 million.

MTN also reported a substantial decrease in earnings per share, which it warned shareholders about at the beginning of August.

It reported that basic earnings per share decreased by 78% to R1.48, down from R6.74 in 2020.

The earnings per share were impacted by impairment losses of 71 cents relating to MTN Yemen and derecognition losses relating to MTN Syria of approximately 262 cents.

“There was some offset arising from the gain on disposal of [Belgacom International Carrier Services], amounting to approximately 67 cents,” MTN stated.

MTN noted that earnings per share in June 2020 had included the benefit from gains amounting to approximately 341 cents on the disposal of the ATC Uganda and ATC Ghana tower associates announced in March 2020.

The average MTN prepaid customer in South Africa now consumes more than 2GB of data every month, while a postpaid customer in the country uses about five times that — 10GB.

This was revealed in MTN’s interim financial results for the first half of 2021, which showed a big increase in data traffic on its network in South Africa over this period.

The operator said a 30% decline in its effective data rate supported increased data usage on its network.

MTN stated that data was a key driver of its strong growth in overall service revenue in the country.

MTN South Africa’s service revenue hit R19.25 billion in the first half of 2021, an increase of 9.3% from R17.61 billion in the first half of 2020.

Data revenue surged 12.3% from R7.03 billion to R7.9 billion.

This growth was supported by a 56.5% year-on-year rise in data traffic and a year-on-year increase of approximately 56,000 active data subscribers to 15.8 million.

MTN Data Plan

MTN announced on Tuesday that it was further slashing data prices for all its customers after initially offering lower bundle prices to select subscribers.

The company summarised the changes to its product prices as follows:

• Sub-1GB 30-day data bundles will be reduced by up to 26%.
• The 1GB data bundle will be reduced by 14%.
• Data bundles larger than 1GB will be reduced by up to 60%.
• More data value has been added for night-time use, starting from the 2GB bundle and above.

These price changes will be rolling out across its sales channels in the coming weeks, MTN said.

The table below provides a summary of MTN’s new data prices.

Previous data	Previous price	New data	New price
200MB	R39	200MB	R29
350MB	R60	350MB	R49
500MB	R75	500MB	R69
1GB	R99	1GB	R85
1.5GB	R149	1.5GB	R99
2GB	R189	2GB (day) + 2GB (night)	R149
3GB	R229	3GB (day) + 3GB (night)	R199
	New product	4GB (day) + 4GB (night)	R299
6GB	R349	6GB (day) + 6GB (night)	R349
10GB	R469	10 GB (day) + 10GB (night)	R469
20GB	R699	20GB (day) + 20GB (night)	R599
30GB	R999	30GB (day) + 30GB (night)	R699
50GB	R1 499	50GB (day) + 50GB (night)	R799
100GB	R2 499	100GB (day) + 100GB (night)	R999