MTN Just Had Its Best Half in Years — and Nigerian Businesses Weren't Buying

If you run a business in Lagos, Abuja or Kano, you almost certainly send money to MTN every month — for office data, for staff lines, maybe for a leased circuit or a rack in a data centre. So when MTN Group told the Johannesburg market on 24 August that it had just delivered record profitability, and that Nigeria did much of the lifting, you would be forgiven for assuming your own spending was part of that story.

It was not. Buried in the same reporting season is a fact almost nobody put in a headline: the part of MTN Nigeria that sells to businesses like yours went backwards. Enterprise revenue fell. Wholesale revenue more than halved. Every naira of growth came from ordinary subscribers buying data bundles. That gap tells you something uncomfortable about where Nigerian corporate technology spending is actually going.

The headline number, and the one underneath it

MTN Group's interim results announcement, published through the JSE's news service on 24 August, puts group service revenue at R115.3 billion, up 17.5% in constant-currency terms and 9.7% as reported. EBITDA before once-off items rose 24.4% in constant currency, lifting the margin to 47.6% — a record for the group. Adjusted headline earnings per share climbed 21.3% to 793 cents.

That 21.3% figure travelled the furthest. It is also the flattering one. The same filing shows reported headline earnings per share falling 5.8%, to 615 cents — a gap MTN attributes mainly to a non-cash impairment on its Irancell stake and foreign-exchange losses in South Sudan. Adjusted HEPS is the better guide to the operating business. But if you only saw "profit up 21.3%", you saw half the picture.

Nigeria did the lifting — and took the capital

MTN Nigeria's own half-year filing is the engine room. Revenue rose 25.9% to ₦2.99 trillion, profit after tax rose 70.6% to ₦707.5 billion, and the board declared an interim dividend of ₦26 per share payable 7 September. The subscriber base reached 92.2 million, with the average Nigerian customer using roughly 14.8GB a month.

Group CEO Ralph Mupita told the results call that capital intensity in Nigeria ran "over 20%" in the half — against a group-wide 16.6% on R19.7 billion of capex — as MTN pushed fixed wireless access and fibre into homes. Nigeria is no longer just MTN's biggest subscriber market. It is where the group is choosing to spend.

The line nobody put in a headline

Per MTN Nigeria's H1 financial statements, enterprise revenue fell 12.8% to ₦293.9 billion from ₦337.2 billion. Wholesale more than halved, from ₦93.5 billion to ₦46.4 billion. Interconnect and roaming slipped too. Consumer revenue, meanwhile, rose 36.2% to ₦2.65 trillion.

The arithmetic of that divergence is stark: individual subscribers now supply 88.6% of MTN Nigeria's revenue, up from 81.9% a year earlier, while enterprise has fallen to 9.8% from 14.2%. Direct costs attributable to enterprise customers rose 21.8% even as revenue from them fell.

What makes this more than an accounting curiosity is where MTN has been investing. The nine-megawatt Sifiso Dabengwa Data Centre, valued at around $235 million across both phases, sells to enterprises — as does the reported $240 million AI data centre commitment under MTN's Genova unit. Yet the revenue line covering cloud, infrastructure and ICT sales came to ₦23.9 billion for the half, roughly eight-tenths of one per cent of revenue. MTN has built for the enterprise layer. The layer is not buying at the pace the capital assumed.

What that means if you are the customer

A supplier whose business segment is contracting behaves differently from one whose segment is compounding. Practically:

You have more negotiating room than you think. A shrinking enterprise book with rising direct costs is a book that needs defending. Renewal season is the moment to test that.
Do not assume enterprise gets the attention consumer gets. Nine in ten naira arrives from retail. Escalation paths and SLA enforcement should be written into contracts, not assumed from the brand.
Local cloud and colocation capacity is being built ahead of demand. Excess capacity means better pricing for early movers — relevant if data-localisation rules are pushing your hosting onshore anyway.
Single-supplier concentration is a live risk. Consumer service quality already drew a regulator-ordered compensation exercise for shortfalls between November 2025 and January 2026. Build a second path for anything revenue-critical.

And MTN is about to own the towers its rivals rent

The strategic move of the half is not in the revenue lines at all. MTN is buying the remaining shares in tower company IHS Holding for roughly $2.2 billion, valuing IHS at an enterprise value of about $6.2 billion. IHS runs some 28,000 towers across five African markets — and Nigeria alone accounts for about 15,848 sites, more than half the African portfolio.

Those towers carry MTN's competitors — which is why Nigeria's regulators have not waved the deal through. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission's conditional approval requires MTN to sell down up to 30% of the Nigerian component of IHS to local investors at arm's length, with proceeds reducing IHS debt. Separately, the Nigerian Communications Commission confirmed on 25 August that it granted a conditional Approval-in-Principle in mid-July, subject to corporate governance compliance, a bar on amending existing contracts because of the deal, a prohibition on exclusivity, and an investment plan with measurable milestones. Final NCC approval has not been issued.

Read those conditions and you can see the worry: one operator owning the physical infrastructure its rivals depend on. Those safeguards are the reason your Airtel or Glo backup link should still work on the same commercial terms after closing — and the reason to watch whether they hold.

Where the sources disagree

Reporting on these results has not been consistent, and the discrepancies are worth naming rather than smoothing over:

Subscriber additions. Nigerian business press, working from the MTN Nigeria filing, reported 4.9 million net additions. Techpoint Africa, citing a report shared with it by the company, reported 7.5 million. Both arrive at a 92.2 million base.
Which profit. Nairametrics led with ₦1.09 trillion, up 75.4%; most others led with ₦707.5 billion, up 70.6%. The first is pre-tax, the second after tax. Neither is wrong; they are different lines.
The dividend. MTN Group declared no interim dividend and confirmed a R6 billion share repurchase instead. MTN Nigeria declared ₦26 per share. Two listed entities, two decisions — easy to conflate.
The market ranking. Several outlets reported that South Africa has slipped to MTN's third-largest market behind Nigeria and Ghana. The interim results announcement does not publish that ranking; it confirms only that Nigeria and Ghana led growth while South Africa managed 1.5%. Treat the ranking as commentary, not disclosure.

The read for Nigerian business

MTN's half tells a story Nigeria should recognise. Consumer digital demand here is genuine, durable and strong enough to carry a pan-African group. Corporate digital demand is the softer number — and it is soft at exactly the moment infrastructure is being built for it, from MTN's own data centres to the national cloud certification regime arriving in October. The capacity is landing ahead of the appetite. That gap is an opportunity if you are buying and a warning if you are selling. Somebody will fill it.

So: has your business actually increased its spend on Nigerian enterprise connectivity and cloud this year — or quietly held it flat while consumer data bills climbed?