Category: Media releases
MTN Group, in partnership with Huawei, officially inaugurated the Technology Innovation Lab at MTN Group’s headquarters. This milestone marks a significant advancement in their ongoing collaboration across diverse digital fields. Initially announced during MWC 2024, when the parties signed a Memorandum of Understanding, the establishment of the lab aims to further deepen their collaboration, accelerating digital transformation and sustainable development across Africa.
The Technology Innovation Lab is poised to be a catalyst for digital progress in Africa. By fostering cross-regional collaboration, it will stimulate the African digital ecosystem and promote the rapid development, deployment, and adoption of cutting-edge innovative solutions.
This lab plays a crucial role in MTN’s evolution, moving beyond the traditional telecommunications operator role to become a leading provider of comprehensive technology services. Research and development within the lab will concentrate on vital areas including 5G and 5G-A technologies, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cloud computing, FTTH, automation and digital financial services – all catalysts for Africa’s digital future.
During a tour of the facilities at the launch event, visitors were treated to several world-class technology use cases across Network, Fintech, Information Technology (IT) and Security (IS).
Ralph Mupita, President and Chief Executive Officer of MTN Group, stated: “This lab further demonstrates our commitment to developing relevant, sustainable, and transformative solutions designed specifically for the African context and signifies a strategic investment in Africa’s future – It’s about solutions born in Africa, for Africa. It will catalyse the growth of the digital economy, fostering innovation and generating long-lasting opportunities to empower communities and advance the continent’s development.”
Mazen Mroué, Chief Technology and Information Officer at MTN Group emphasised during the ceremony: “The Technology Innovation Lab is more than just a hub for tech; it’s a platform for collaboration, demonstrating our technology capabilities resulting from the continuous investment made by MTN during the last 30 years. It is a space where the best minds can come together, share ideas, and push the boundaries of what’s possible. By working closely, we can leverage each other’s strengths and the collective brilliance of Africa’s innovators to create solutions that will transform lives. This collaborative spirit is what will unlock the true potential of this lab.”
Cao Ming, President of Huawei’s Wireless Solutions, stated: “We will collaborate with MTN to create leading products and solutions for the African market, and together explore new business models to lead the industry forward. We believe that the establishment of the innovation lab will accelerate the development of Africa’s digital economy and build a more prosperous and sustainable African continent.”
The Technology Innovation Lab will serve as a hub for experimentation, demonstration, and skill-building. It is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and resources designed to support cutting-edge research and development initiatives. The Lab is open to MTNers, partners and other stakeholders based on prior reservation to access the facility. This stands as a testament to MTN and Huawei’s dedication to the future of Africa. It will pave the way for unparalleled innovation, digital inclusion, and economic progress across the continent.
ayoba is pleased to share the achievement of a significant milestone with the super-app reaching 35 million monthly active users across the African continent in December 2023. This growth is attributed to the heightened retention rates and organic adoption, fuelled by an enhanced user experience in the communication suite and a robust content offering that includes music, channels, games, and services. The expansion has been further propelled by the inclusion of users from new territories such as Kenya, Egypt, Mali, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Botswana.
Selorm Adadevoh, MTN Group Chief Commercial Officer shares, “Empowering connections, fostering innovation, and charting the course for a digital future, ayoba is more than an app – it’s a transformative journey. Like the continent itself, ayoba has been resilient, dynamic, and forward-thinking. As we reflect on the milestones of 2023, it’s clear that our dedication to innovation and user-centricity has propelled ayoba to new heights. With gratitude for the past and a vision for the future, we embarked on 2024 with a steadfast commitment to continuing to evolve ayoba delivering enriched experiences for its growing user base in Africa. Our focus remains unwavering on empowering communities, driving innovation, and building a sustainable ecosystem for long-term growth, ayoba is not just an app; it’s a testament to the power of connectivity.“
ayoba saw strong growth in 2023 in many areas of the service. Usage of Music continued to increase via ayoba’s popular playlist service* in collaboration with Boomplay, which ended the year in excess of 600 million streams. Amongst many other growth drivers were improvements in the messaging vertical and popularity of the new ‘Explore’ landing page.
Looking ahead to 2024, Burak Akinci, ayoba’s CEO, expresses optimism, saying “We are very proud of our achievements in 2023, and we have a lot to look forward to in the coming year. We begin the year with a strong offering for Football fans including multiple daily news updates, games, themed playlists to name a few. As we move into the year, our product and content teams have many updates coming across Messaging and Groups, User Stories, Music, Games and more. Our focus in 2024 will extend to the B2B front, introducing features to benefit our partners and leverage our growing ecosystem and traffic.“
In 2023, ayoba successfully launched content marketing attracting partnerships with top brands such as Cadbury’s, Chappies. The year ahead will see a heightened focus on expanding partnerships with known brands, as new Ad Sales options are introduced to capitalise on the growing user base and engagement.
On the content front, ayoba has secured new high-profile partners, from international NGOs to the localised Dycoco offering, adding more French comedy to the highly popular Adamant Media series on the platform. In plans for 2024, includes the introduction of more podcasts, playlists, education, sports news, lifestyle updates and uplifting with a focus on short-form video.
ayoba is set to launch an updated range of services, including a communications API, new payment partners and improvements to its partner portal. The newly launched ‘Discover’ Page in the Services vertical offers new traffic drivers for partners, as well as a curated services offering.
Messaging has always been a core focus for ayoba. Following on the successful re-engineering of the messaging module in 2023 which included a design and features refresh; ayoba will turn its attention to commercial features in 2024. This includes the introduction of business accounts with related support and a suite of business-oriented features.
*in partnership with Boomplay
MTN has again been ranked the most valuable South African brand, as well as the top South African brand by ‘sustainability perceptions value’ by Brand Finance South Africa 100 2024, which assigned MTN a brand value of R68.2 billion and a sustainability perceptions value of R5.7 billion.
“It is both encouraging and humbling that we retain our top spot after 30 years in the business and that – despite the significant macroeconomic challenges we are facing – our brand also has the strongest association to perceptions of sustainability,” said MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita. “We would like to thank our customers and other stakeholders everywhere for their support and we’d also like to thank our people for their commitment.”
Brand Finance said: “While global operations can significantly enhance brand visibility and financial performance, they also introduce complexities that can affect brand strength negatively. These include navigating different regulatory environments, cultural nuances, and operational challenges including wars that can impact customer perceptions and loyalty.”
Brand Finance attributed MTN’s brand strength to “the company’s effective strategies in areas such as customer service, advertising, loyalty programs, and overall reputation management”.
The report also named Ralph Mupita the top ranked ‘Brand Guardian’ among South African CEOs.
For more information visit: Brand Finance
MTN Group Limited (“MTN”) wishes to confirm that its wholly owned subsidiary MTN Dubai Limited has entered into an agreement for the sale of its 75% shareholding in Areeba Guinea S.A. to Telecel Group. The sale remains in line with MTN’s portfolio optimisation focus within our Ambition 2025 strategy.
The sale has not reached completion and remains subject to conditions precedent being satisfactorily met, including the receipt of regulatory and other approvals from the relevant authorities in Guinea.
MTN will continue to work and cooperate with the relevant regulatory authorities, to ensure that all the appropriate requirements for transactions of this nature are addressed.
MTN wishes to reassure our customers in Guinea that the ongoing transaction will not affect the services offered to them.
MTN Group announces the appointment of Mike Silber, as Group Executive Regulatory, effective 1 April 2024. He joins MTN Group from Liquid Telecom, where he held the role of Group Chief Regulatory Officer, for five years.
During his tenure at Liquid Telecom, Mike was instrumental in the creation and expansion of the most extensive cross-border fibre network in Africa, as well as the continent’s largest networked data centre operation. These achievements highlight his commitment to enhancing Africa’s digital landscape and his adeptness in navigating the complex terrain of legal, policy, and regulatory challenges to drive business success and improve connectivity.
Lele Modise, Group Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer shared: “Mike’s extensive background, spanning legal expertise and regulatory leadership across Africa and beyond, makes him a valuable addition to our team. His passion for bridging digital connections within Africa and with the world resonates deeply with MTN’s purpose. We look forward to the innovative approaches and insights Mike will contribute to our efforts in enabling a modern connected life for everyone on the continent.”
With over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications and internet sectors, he brings legal, policy and regulatory expertise of addressing business challenges and finding creative solutions to deliver business results.
Mike is a distinguished South African attorney, holding B Proc and LLB degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand. His extensive experience includes serving on the boards of several industry bodies, such as ISPA South Africa and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and he is an associate of the LINK Centre at Wits. Currently, he also contributes his expertise to the boards of the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa and the Public Interest Registry.
MTN Group warmly welcomes Mike to his new role and anticipates his significant contributions towards achieving the Group’s vision of leading digital solutions for Africa’s progress.
MTN Group reported a resilient underlying operating performance for 2023 in the face of tough macro headwinds, declaring a total dividend of 330 cents per share. Inflation remained elevated in several key markets and the sharp devaluation of the Nigerian naira impacted reported results for both MTN Nigeria and MTN Group.
Amid sustained high demand for data and fintech services, MTN Group increased the number of active data subscribers by more than 9% to 150 million – half the total subscriber base – and active Mobile Money (MoMo) users by 5% to 72.5 million. Total subscribers increased to 295 million across the Group’s markets.
In the year to end-December 2023, data traffic on MTN’s networks (excluding joint ventures) grew by more than a third, with usage up to an average of more than 6GB per user per month. To sustain this growth, as well as network coverage and quality, MTN deployed capital expenditure (excluding leases) of R41 billion in the year.
The volume of fintech transactions also increased by around a third to 17.6 billion, with the value of transactions across the fintech platform up at US$272 billion, driven by growth of advanced services in payments, banktech and remittance solutions.
In South Africa, where the business faced loadshedding challenges, subsidiary MTN South Africa deployed R10 billion of capex to drive network capacity expansion and power resilience. More than R2.6 billion of this was investment in power and security resilience. By the end of the year, network availability across the entire network reached around 95%. For the sites where we had completed our resilience investment, we recorded network availability of more than 98%.
MTN South Africa reported solid growth in the consumer postpaid, enterprise and wholesale businesses. In the second half of the year there were also sequential improvements in the consumer prepaid business.
Strategic delivery
In the year, MTN Group made good strategic progress in the development of our fintech and fibre businesses. A key highlight was concluding an agreement for payment network processor Mastercard to invest up to US$200 million for a minority stake in MTN Group Fintech at a valuation of US$5.2 billion.
“We are excited about this partnership, particularly the commercial agreements, which we expect to support the accelerated growth of our fintech business,” said MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita. “In 2023, we also advanced our work to structurally separate the fibre business, Bayobab, with engagements to secure regulatory clearances in key markets being the main priority.”
In the year, Bayobab and Africa50 partnered to develop Project East2West, a terrestrial fibre optic cable network to help bridge Africa’s connectivity gap by improving broadband access for the continent’s landlocked countries in particular.
Among the Group’s other strategic progress highlights were the 13.1% absolute reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions. This is part of our environmental commitment to reach Net Zero emissions by 2040. We also finalised the sale of MTN Afghanistan, which completed the Group’s exit of our consolidated subsidiaries in the Middle East.
Resilient results
In the year, MTN Group’s finances withstood a challenging external environment, marked by elevated inflation (averaging a blended 16.7%), forex volatility and paucity, and ongoing political tensions in some markets, most notably in Sudan.
In constant currency terms, MTN Group service revenue grew 13.5% to R210 billion, with data revenue making up R84 billion and voice revenue contributing R83 billion. Fintech revenue totalled R21 billion.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation grew by almost 10% in constant currency terms to R90 billion. The Group delivered expense efficiencies of R2.6 billion and kept key debt ratios within covenant levels.
Outlook and priorities
Looking ahead, Mupita said MTN remained focused on executing on Ambition 2025: sustaining operational momentum, accelerating the platforms strategy, driving expense and capital efficiencies, and continuing to strengthen the balance sheet.
“We are anticipating that the macro conditions in our trading environment will persist in 2024, with naira volatility and elevated inflation the key challenges we will need to navigate. MTN plans to invest R35-39 billion in 2024 to position the company to capture the structural demand for data and fintech services across Africa,” he said.
“We maintain our overall medium-term guidance framework, however simplifying our objective for fintech,” Mupita said, adding that MTN was encouraged by the outlook for the fintech business, given the solid growth in advanced services. “The partnership with Mastercard positions the business well to scale faster and we are excited about the commercial launches of card issuance, acceptance and remittances across the footprint.”
As of 19 March 2024, Bayobab Group, a subsidiary of MTN Group, has successfully restored its operations, recovering over 3 Terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity across our footprint.
Although the recent subsea cable disruptions on 14 March 2024 presented challenges, we have demonstrated our capabilities to maintain a resilient network and efficiently reroute traffic.
Throughout this challenging period, we prioritised the restoration of services by swiftly activating new cables to increase inter-connectivity and establish alternative routes, thereby bolstering our network resilience.
This approach solidifies our commitment to prioritising network reliability, and our dedication to connecting Africa and our customers as quickly as possible marking the final stretch toward connecting all our valued customers. Bayobab’s ecosystem facilitates secure and scalable global traffic within Africa and the rest of the world serving 19 MTN markets, third-party Mobile Network Operators, Technology corporations and other Telecoms Service Providers.
MTN Group’s Bayobab is working with its partners on the coordination of repair work to damaged underwater digital communication cables along the West Coast of Africa.
As confirmed by their consortium partners, on 14 March 2024 four subsea cables were cut. They are WACS, ACE, SAT3 and MainOne.
Bayobab is also working with partners to mitigate the impact of the damage by rerouting traffic and enabling more circuits.
ACE and WACS have jointly initiated the repair process by mobilising a cable ship for a collaborative repair effort. While investigation and repair efforts are underway, Bayobab’s strategy focuses on successfully rerouting traffic, leveraging our extensive network, and collaborating with industry partners.
Our network resiliency allows for the swift activation of new cables, facilitating faster rerouting and bolstering network resilience. By activating new cables, we quickly increase interconnectivity and establish alternative routes.
Additionally, we are working with the cable consortiums and partners to enhance interconnection along both the west and east coasts, with further interconnections between WACS and Equiano, and the introduction of the end-to-end connection between WACS on the west coast and EASSy on the east coast.
We have already made progress in restoring service in some affected regions and remain committed to achieving full recovery as expeditiously as possible.
Recognising the critical importance of network reliability, we work to continuously strengthen our infrastructure to mitigate future disruptions.
We sincerely appreciate your understanding and patience during this period.
Bayobab Group acknowledges the ongoing disruptions affecting connectivity services in several West African countries, due to breaks in multiple major undersea cables. Recognising the critical importance of consistent internet and communication services, we are fully committed to swiftly addressing these disruptions.
To mitigate the impact on our customers in the affected countries, our operations are actively working to reroute traffic through alternative network paths and engaging with our consortium partners to expedite the repair process for the damaged cables. Leveraging our robust and resilient network infrastructure, we aim to minimise service interruptions and maintain connectivity.
We thank you for your patience and understanding as we work diligently to resolve this situation.
MTN Group announces the appointment of Ali Monzer as Chief Executive Officer of MTN South Sudan, effective 1 April 2024. Ali succeeds Gordian Kyomukama, who will retire after a distinguished career with MTN.
Ali brings over 23 years of telecommunications industry experience to his new role. Since joining MTN in 2004, he has held progressively senior positions, most recently as Chief Technology and Information Officer of MTN Uganda. In previous roles, he has demonstrated success in operational efficiency, cost optimisation, market growth and customer experience enhancement. He holds a master’s degree in computer communication engineering and relevant industry certifications.
“I am pleased to have Ali spearheading our operations in South Sudan and believe he will add immense value to the market,” said Ralph Mupita, MTN Group President and CEO. “His wealth of experience and proven track record in technology and operations make him well-positioned to drive MTN South Sudan’s continued growth and success.”
Extending his sincere gratitude to Gordian Kyomukama for his invaluable leadership and contributions throughout his tenure with the company, Mupita added, “I wish to take this opportunity to thank Gordian Kyomukama for always displaying vigour, determination, and an exemplary work ethic in his role.”