Ghana’s biggest telecommunication firm, MTN Ghana has increased its profit by 25.9% year-on-year to ¢868.2 million in the first six months of this year.

According to its 2021 Audited Half-Year Financial Statement, revenue grew by 24.9% to ¢3.6 billion in June 2021.

It attributed ongoing execution and delivery of ‘Ambition 2025’ initiatives in data, MoMo and digital transcations throughout the first half of the year that have supported service revenue growth by 25.5% year-on-year as the reason, adding “we continued to improve on our technology and quality of service with a total capex [capital expenditure] spend of ¢569 million during the period.”

“As part of the network expansion plan, we rolled out 123 2G, 120 3G and 802 4G sites and modernized 1,007 existing sites to 4G sites. This investment helped spur data traffic growth of 53.2% and enabled us to reach a total of 2,677 4G sites nationwide, resulting in an increase in our 4G population coverage to 79.9% from 76.1%”, it added.

Despite all this, MTN Ghana said it remains cautious for the remainder of 2021, due to the uncertainties surrounding the recovery of Ghana’s economy following the longer-term effects of the pandemic [Covid-19].

Voice revenue

Voice revenue in the period delivered growth of 3.3% year-on-year.

“We expect our subscriber base to grow as we continue the execution of various customer value management (CVM) initiatives”, the telecom market leader said.

The contribution of voice to service revenue declined from 43.7% to 35.9% year-on-year in favour of strategic growth drivers such as data and Mobile Money.

Data revenue

Data revenue also expanded by 47.9% year-on-year, driven by a 1.8% increase in active data subscribers, a higher number of smartphones on the network (+0.7%) and a 53.2% year-on-year increase in data traffic.

“In line with our revenue diversification strategy, the contribution of data to service revenue increased from 28.5% to 33.6% year-on-year.

MoMo Revenue

Revenue from Mobile Money grew at 50.9% year-on-year.

This the company said was driven by growth in P2P transactional activity and advanced services such as retail merchant payments, insurance and international remittances.

The number of active MoMo users however declined by 1.8% for the period.

However, the contribution of MoMo to service revenue increased from 19.2% to 23.1% year-on-year.

Outlook

MTN Ghana said its performance for the remainder of 2021 will be influenced by the extent of economic recovery and the progress in vaccination rollout.

“The projected growth for the Ghanaian economy, per the 2021 Ghana budget, is 5.0%. This captures some of the optimism regarding the potential benefits of the above mentioned vaccination efforts in 2021 along with additional policy support in Ghana to drive economic recovery”.

While economic growth projections are positive, the telecom market leader retain some caution as the potential longer-term dampening effects of the pandemic are yet to be ascertained.

Against this backdrop, it expects to outperform its medium-term guidance as it employ various initiatives to grow its data, digital and Mobile Money businesses in line with “Ambition 2025”.