MTN Uganda reports strong first-quarter performance

MTN Uganda has reported a strong operational performance for the first quarter, driven by solid growth in its voice, data and fintech business units.

Total revenue grew 19.5% to 750.5-billion Ugandan shillings from a year ago, while profit after tax increased 24.4% to 150-billion Ugandan shillings.

Service revenue grew by 19.4%, underpinned by strong double-digit growth in voice (up 15.5%), data (22.4%) and fintech (23.5%) revenues.

“Our robust financial result was further driven by a solid commercial performance with subscribers up by 12.0% to 19.9-million,” said CEO Sylvia Mulinge.

Active data subscribers and fintech users were up by 27.6% and 13.6%, respectively.

“To accelerate core connectivity, we invested a total of 122-billion Ugandan shillings focusing on strategic network enhancements, particularly on 4G LTE. We also increased our fibre deployment and 5G coverage as we enriched our home broadband proposition,” she said.

The group deepened smartphone penetration by 5.9 percentage points to 40.6%, supported by its strategic device financing partnerships.

“Increased smartphone usage has enabled us to drive a digital lifestyle through appification. This quarter, on My MTN app, we launched Tesa deals, an online marketplace to support the entrepreneurial activities of our youthful base while on the MoMo app, we launched an online ticketing service offering a suite of tools designed to improve event management,” she said.

Mulinge said there was a slight increase in macro headwinds, particularly inflation, in the first three months of the year.

“These headwinds are expected to remain in the near term, with Bank of Uganda projecting inflation to trend up further to a range of 5.5-6% over the year, which may impact our customers,” she said.

“This quarter, we will continue the work to address our localisation requirement to explore a further sell-down of the 7% shareholding to the public to broaden our shareholder base.

“We maintain our medium-term guidance of delivering mid-teen service revenue growth, stable ebitda [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation] margins above 50% and maintaining capex (ex-leases) intensity at mid-teen levels as we support our growth prospects,” she said.

mackenziej@arena.africa