MTN grows its customer base in South Africa

MTN Group says its South African operation continues to gain momentum, increasing its subscriber base by 2% to 29.1 million for the period ended September 2015.

This, it said, was mainly as a result of a 3.1% increase in the pre-paid subscriber base, supported by the continued success of attractive below-the-line campaigns.

The post-paid subscriber base however, recorded a 2.6% decline to 5.2 million due to the disconnections of approximately 90,000 low-cost router SIMs recorded on the Autopage subscriber base and low availability of handsets.

“While supply chain issues have been largely resolved, the operation continued to experience limited availability of handsets during the quarter as a result of delayed deliveries,” MTN said.

Data revenue increased 40% and now contributes 31.5% to total revenue. This was driven by attractive segmented data bundles and an increased uptake of digital services, the operator said.

The company added 1,746 largely co-located 3G and 811 LTE sites during the quarter.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) increased 8.8% for the quarter, to R96,21 in SA, MTN said.

MTN connects approximately 233 million people in 22 countries across Africa and the
Middle East.

Read: MTN threatens to pull out of South Africa

Group president and CEO, Sifiso Dabengwa said: “The group’s third quarter results reflect continued progress made in the South African operation strengthening its market position and significant improvements in network quality following corrective measures taken in MTN Nigeria.

“Mobile Money and digital content revenues continued to gain healthy traction, steadily increasing their contribution to revenue,” he said.

Registered Mobile Money subscribers advanced 12.7% QoQ to 36.5 million, across 14 operations.

“Aggressive price competition, weakening macroeconomic conditions in most of our markets and unfavourable exchange rate movements continued to impact financial performance for the quarter,” Dabengwa said.

MTN Nigeria recorded a marginal decline in its subscriber base to 62.5 million subscribers. This, MTN said, was mainly as a result of the disconnection of 5.1 million subscribers at the end of August 2015 in line with industry-wide regulatory registration requirements.

To date, 3.4 million of these subscribers have been reconnected. “While management continues to engage with the regulator, performance continues to be impacted by ongoing regulatory restrictions,” MTN said.

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