MTN South Africa reported a 5.7 percent decline in revenue to ZAR 21.12 billion in the first six months of 2020. The company attributed the drop to the loss of its roaming agreement with Telkom and Cell C’s lack of payment for its roaming deal. At the same time, MTN said it saw significant growth in data revenue over the period, as well as strong commercial performance across most sectors of the local business.
MTN said it recognised ZAR 788 million in revenue from Cell C during the period, and ZAR 673 million of Cell C revenues remained unrecognised at June.
EBITDA increased by 3.3 percent to ZAR 8.4 billion in the first half, and the EBITDA margin increased by 3.4 percentage points to 39.9 percent, assisted by efforts to drive cost efficiencies and channel optimisation, reductions in device volumes due to the national lockdown, as well as reductions in device subsidies. Capex increased by 15.9 percent to ZAR 2.8 billion.
Total subscribers increased by 137,000 to 29.0 million. MTN said the prepaid base has started to stabilise as the impact of the discontinuation of the 1GB promotion abated. At end-June, prepaid subscribers were down by 349,000 to 22.5 million, while postpaid subscribers were up 486,000 to 6.6 million. Included in the postpaid base are 323,000 gross additions for short term university and college student deals.
MTN said its good South African performance was achieved as its prepaid business began to recover from the impact of regulatory changes which cracked down on out-of-bundle data billing.
