MTN Subscriber numbers update (8 March 2018)

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Long suffering South African based mobile operator MTN (MTN) has posted a profit of R7.7billion for the year ended 31 December 2017 after struggling for a few years due to regulatory issues in one of MTN's biggest markets, Nigeria. Where the Nigerean government fined MTN a massive amount of money for failing to remove/disable numbers which has not been verified with a known address of the users of the sim cards. The instruction to do so by the Nigerian government was an attempt to curb terrorism communication for groups such as Bhoko Haram

So MTN's subscriber numbers? Which countries are their biggest markets?

The chart below shows the latest subscriber numbers for MTN per region. Where a specific country makes up a large part of MTN's total subscribers of 217.2million people the country is shown on its own.
chart created with amCharts | amCharts
In summary MTN's lates subscriber numbers are as follows:
  • South Africa    29500000
  • Nigeria    52300000
  • Southern and East Africa and Ghana (SEAGHA)    38700000
  • West and Central Africa (WECA)    29100000
  • Middle East and North Africa (MENA) excl Iran    24300000
  • MTN IranCell    43300000
MTN reported that of their 217.2million subscribers they have 69.1million active data users. This is important to keep an eye out as this segment is growing extremely fast and MTN's data revenue increased by a substantial 34.2% over the last 12months to R28.2billion) in the last year for MTN. And this is expected to keep growing as more and more people across Africa get access to smart phones and data contract options.
While subscriber numbers are nice to know. Question is what kinds of revenues are earned from the various regions? The numbers below shows the revenue earned per region/country as shown in the pie chart above.

  • South Africa    R42.5billion
  • Nigeria    R36bilion
  • Southern and East Africa and Ghana (SEAGHA)    R20.1billion
  • West and Central Africa (WECA)    20.95billion
  • Middle East and North Africa (MENA) excl Iran   R12.7billion
  • MTN IranCell    R16.5billion
The above clearly shows that South Africa is the major money spinner, with them having far less subscribers in South Africa than in Nigeria yet the revenues in South Africa is far higher than that of Nigeria. The chart below represents the information above in a graphic.
chart created with amCharts | amCharts

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