MTN is finding its next growth engine outside South Africa, propelled by accelerating MTN Nigeria growth and a fresh MTN share buyback that signals just how confident the group’s leadership has become about its pan-African strategy.
The telecom operator’s latest half-year results, released this week, tell a story that has been building for several reporting cycles now. While MTN’s home market continues to tick along at a modest pace, the real momentum is coming from Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and a handful of other markets that were once considered secondary to the group’s South African core. Total customers climbed 6.7% to 317.7 million, active data subscribers rose 9.1% to 179.3 million, and MTN’s mobile money platform, MoMo, saw its monthly active users grow 12.1% to 70.8 million. Fintech transaction values jumped nearly 34% in constant currency to $330.5 billion, a figure that underscores how central financial services have become to the group’s identity beyond simple connectivity.
South Africa, by contrast, grew just 1.5%. That single number captures the structural shift underway inside Africa’s largest telecom group. A market that once anchored MTN’s earnings and defined its brand is now the slowest-growing piece of a much larger puzzle. Nigeria, Ghana and the West African cluster are doing the heavy lifting, and the company’s own disclosures make clear this isn’t a temporary blip but a deliberate reallocation of investment and attention.
Adjusted headline earnings per share, which strips out the effects of hyperinflation and currency swings, rose 21.3%. Reported earnings told a messier story, falling 5.8% largely because of a noncash impairment tied to the group’s stake in Irancell, MTN’s Iranian joint venture, which has been battered by the ongoing conflict in the region along with broader economic instability there. The group booked impairment losses equal to 213 cents per share because of the war and Iran’s deteriorating economic conditions, more than double the 104 cents recorded a year earlier. Add in foreign exchange losses and hyperinflation-related charges, and the non-operational drag on the bottom line was substantial. Yet the underlying telecom business, stripped of those one-off distortions, kept growing at a pace few global peers can match.
That resilience is why the board approved a share buyback of up to 31 million shares, roughly 10% of the company, starting immediately. It’s a notable vote of confidence from a group that just months earlier was absorbing hits from currency devaluation, geopolitical risk in the Middle East and regulatory headaches in its most important market. The buyback follows an earlier repurchase programme announced when MTN reported its full-year 2025 results, and together they suggest management believes the market is undervaluing a business that now earns the overwhelming majority of its revenue from outside its home country.
That figure, 82%, has become something of a rallying point for MTN Group chief executive Ralph Mupita, who has used it repeatedly in public appearances to argue that MTN is no longer simply a South African company with African operations, but a genuinely pan-African platform business. Speaking at the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation’s winter seminar earlier this year, Mupita warned that rising anti-migrant sentiment and xenophobia could undermine the continental integration that businesses like his depend on. His point was straightforward: a digital economy built on mobile money, data services and cross-border commerce doesn’t function well when people, capital and ideas can’t move freely across national lines. MTN chair Mcebisi Jonas made a similar argument at the same event, pointing to the historical role migrant labour has played in building South Africa’s mining, agricultural and commercial sectors.
The commercial case for MTN’s outward tilt is easy enough to see in the numbers. Group earnings before tax in Nigeria more than doubled in 2025, rising to roughly R32 billion from R16 billion the year before. Of the group’s planned capital expenditure this year, a meaningful share is earmarked specifically for accelerating investment in MTN Nigeria and MTN Ghana, the two markets management has identified as the clearest path to sustained growth. Nigeria’s service revenue grew more than 40% in constant currency terms during the first quarter alone, with Ghana not far behind. Those figures dwarf anything South Africa has produced in recent memory, and they explain why MTN’s capital allocation decisions increasingly point west and north rather than staying concentrated at home.
There’s also a longer-term reshuffling in motion. In an interview with TechCentral late last year, Mupita acknowledged that MTN’s footprint remains lopsided, with its real strength clustered around South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana while East Africa, home to some of the continent’s fastest-growing economies, remains comparatively underdeveloped for the group. He signalled an intention to correct that imbalance over the next three to five years, which would mark a meaningful expansion of MTN’s ambitions beyond its traditional West African stronghold.
Meanwhile, MTN continues working through one of its more consequential structural moves: the acquisition of the roughly 75% of IHS Towers it doesn’t already own. IHS shareholders approved the transaction in early August, clearing a major hurdle, though regulatory approvals are still pending. Nigeria’s competition regulator has already granted conditional approval, requiring MTN to reduce its stake in the Nigerian business by up to 30% over time at market prices, a condition that reflects how sensitive local regulators remain about foreign and dominant-operator control of critical telecom infrastructure. The tower deal, once finalised, would give MTN tighter control over infrastructure economics in one of its most important markets, reinforcing the very growth engine that’s now carrying the group.
None of this means South Africa becomes irrelevant to MTN’s story. It remains the group’s headquarters, its JSE listing anchor and a market where the company still needs to defend share against aggressive prepaid competition. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. Data adoption, fintech penetration and smartphone growth are advancing faster in Nigeria, Ghana and the wider West African region than in the mature, competitive South African market, and MTN’s capital, management attention and public messaging are following that growth accordingly. For a company built and listed in Johannesburg, finding its next act largely outside its own borders is as much a statement about Africa’s shifting economic centre of gravity as it is about one telecom operator’s strategy. You can find more on MTN’s ongoing shift toward pan-African growth in Techchora’s coverage of Africa’s telecom sector, and readers wanting the underlying figures can consult MTN’s own investor disclosures on mtn.com.
