MTN Group on Thursday said strong growth in Nigeria and Ghana helped offset lower revenues in its home market South Africa.
The telco said it delivered a solid performance in the first quarter this year, boosting service revenue by 11.1 per cent and increasing service revenue by 16.5 per cent to ZAR 38.7 billion.
MTN said the COVID-19 situation is an evolving one and will undoubtedly affect the year ahead. Given the uncertainties associated with the duration and economic impact of the pandemic, it is difficult to reliably quantify the financial effects on the business at this early stage. However, the company has lowered its capex budget for the year on expected disruptions to the supply chain and challenges rolling out under lockdown rules, combined with a focus on preserving liquidity.
While voice revenue took a dip, data traffic rise fast. MTN said traffic patterns changed following the presidential lockdown of Lagos, Abuja and Ogun States as part of initial responses to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the outbreak of the pandemic, people have switched to WhatsApp, Telegram, Zoom and Google Meets for text and group calls. In less than two months, Zoom grew from 10 million to 300 million users globally. Telegram recently hit 400 million daily active users.
Voice traffic remains MTN’s biggest revenue base. In Q1 2019 it represented 75.9% of all its earnings. And in 2020, phone calls brought in over ?227 billion during the first three months of the year, representing over 68% of the company’s total revenue. Since then, telcos have lost the SMS market to instant messaging apps like Telegram, WhatsApp and even Twitter. They were slow to predict and develop social media platforms to rival Facebook or other platforms for video calls, voice calls or content streaming.
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