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Airtel Africa has invested heavily in its 4G networks over the past 12 months, leading to strong subscriber gains
Airtel Africa has revealed that it now has 99.7 million mobile and fixed line customers across the continent of Africa.
Revenues grew by 10.2 per cent in the first quarter of the 2019/2020 financial year, to stand at $795.9 million. Airtel Africa said that the growth was fuelled by extremely strong performance in its core markets of Nigeria and East Africa.
“I am pleased to report a strong start to the financial year, in our first quarterly results since the IPO. These results, which are in line with our expectations, are clear evidence of the effectiveness of our strategy across Voice, Data and Mobile Money. In the quarter, we delivered a 10% increase in revenue in constant currency terms, with even higher underlying EBITDA growth largely as a result of operating leverage and a tight focus on costs which led to underlying EBITDA margin expansion of 101bps," said Raghunath Mandava, chief executive officer, Airtel Africa.
"Voice revenue, our largest business product, was up 3% largely driven by 9% growth in our customer base, now reaching nearly 100 Mn customers across our footprint. Data revenue, our largest contributor to growth, was up 36% as an increasing number of customers relied on our high-quality and high-speed LTE network, resulting in a 79% growth in data usage. Mobile Money revenue, our fastest growing business, increased by 42% as we expanded our distribution reach," he said.
Airtel Africa has continued to invest in its 4G network infrastructure, adding nearly 1,500 sites over the past three months.
"Now more than half of our sites are 4G. We also continue to prepare for the launch of our Mobile Money business in Nigeria, securing approval of the brand name, an important step as we await approval for our payment service bank license," Mandava added.
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