MTN’s fastest-growing business is no longer the phone call. In the first half of 2026, data contributed R13 billion of the increase in group service revenue on a constant-currency basis, compared with R717 million from voice. Data revenue rose 29.2% to R57.6 billion, while voice grew 2.4%. Group service revenue reached R115.3 billion and EBITDA increased 24.4%, taking the margin to a record 47.6%. The numbers say something more useful than simply that MTN had a good six months: most of its growth is now coming from what customers do online rather than from the service on which the company was built.
MTN has already made that change part of its Ambition 2030 strategy. The company now organises its ambitions around connectivity, fintech and digital infrastructure, describing itself in its interim presentation as an African digital services provider with the customers, infrastructure and coverage to pursue all three. Connectivity still gives MTN the relationship with the customer, but the company increasingly wants to make money from the activity that follows and from more of the infrastructure carrying it.
There’s a different kind of telecoms company taking shape inside those results. Whether MTN can actually build it depends on markets that are developing at very different speeds, regulators who may not share its enthusiasm for consolidation and African consumers having enough money to participate in the digital growth its strategy assumes.
Data is carrying most of the growth
Nigeria shows how quickly the economics of a mobile network can change when data use rises. MTN Nigeria added 7.5 million subscribers during the half and ended June with 92.2 million, while data traffic increased 25.8% and active data users rose 9.3%. Data revenue grew 38.2%, against 11.8% for voice, and service revenue increased 25.7%. MTN also invested R7.3 billion excluding leases in its Nigerian network during the period.
Ghana is further along that change. Data traffic rose 61.5%, active data users increased 17% and data accounted for 58.7% of service revenue, up from 52.8% a year earlier. Digital revenue grew 97.5%, while overall service revenue increased 32.3%.
MTN sees the remaining gaps in African connectivity as commercial headroom. Its presentation puts smartphone penetration in sub-Saharan Africa at 53%, says fewer than 25% of people have access to credit and cites estimates that Africa’s data-centre capacity could grow by between 3.5 and 5.5 times. A 53% smartphone penetration rate can be an investor’s growth opportunity and an affordability problem at the same time, though. The people who haven’t yet moved onto smartphones are unlikely to be distributed evenly across income groups, and getting the next wave online may be harder than selling more data to people who already own capable devices.
That problem is already visible in South Africa, where meaningful connectivity is still shaped by who can afford to get online and stay online as much as whether a network technically reaches them. Device costs, patchy service and the price of remaining connected mean that expanding infrastructure doesn’t automatically produce meaningful access. MTN appears conscious of the constraint. Chipset pricing and its effect on smartphone affordability are among the technology issues the company says it’s monitoring in the second half of 2026, alongside changes in satellite connectivity and AI models. Ambition 2030 needs African consumers to use substantially more digital services, but unmet demand doesn’t guarantee that those consumers will be able to pay for the devices and data needed to satisfy it.
MoMo is starting to resemble financial infrastructure
MoMo is already too large to treat as a useful extra attached to MTN’s mobile business. It had 70.8 million monthly active users at the end of the half, up 12.1%, and processed 13 billion transactions worth $330.5 billion. MTN also reported 1.4 million active agents and 2.3 million active merchants across the ecosystem.
The more revealing numbers are inside those transactions. MTN says advanced services grew 31.8%, compared with 10.7% for basic services, and accounted for 37.4% of MoMo revenue excluding airtime advances. Payments and e-commerce processed $12.7 billion in merchant payments, lending businesses facilitated $2.7 billion in loans and formal cross-border remittances exceeded $3 billion. MTN also has a virtual card operating in seven markets, with about 954,000 cards issued.
That mix explains why MTN’s fintech business matters to the wider strategy. Moving money between two mobile wallets is one service; processing merchant payments and facilitating credit puts MTN into parts of the financial system where banks, payment companies and fintech platforms are competing for the same activity. The recent connection between Yuno and Onafriq’s payment networks shows the same competition developing elsewhere, with value accumulating in the infrastructure connecting merchants, wallets and financial institutions across markets. MTN is approaching the same territory with an unusual advantage: the telecommunications relationship through which tens of millions of people already access digital services.
That advantage doesn’t make fintech growth automatic. Revenue increased 13.3% in constant currency during the half, well below MTN’s medium-term target of high-20% to low-30% growth, while regulatory measures and the suspension of airtime advance and data-credit products in Nigeria weighed on performance. The regulatory exposure grows with the business too. Selling mobile data depends heavily on telecoms regulation; facilitating lending and moving large amounts of money across borders introduces financial rules that differ from country to country. A larger MoMo can be more valuable to MTN while becoming more difficult to run.
The IHS deal puts real money behind the infrastructure plan
MTN’s proposed acquisition of IHS Towers makes the digital-infrastructure part of Ambition 2030 considerably harder to treat as a line in an investor presentation. The company expects the transaction to close in the second half of 2026, subject to the remaining approvals, and says the deal would increase group net debt-to-EBITDA from 0.3x to 0.8x. The ratio would remain below MTN’s medium-term ceiling of 1.0x, but the change shows how much balance-sheet capacity it’s prepared to commit to the acquisition.
Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has already placed a condition on the deal, requiring MTN to sell down as much as 30% of the Nigerian component of IHS over time. MTN says it’s comfortable with the condition. The requirement is an early indication of the questions MTN will face as it expands beyond operating telecoms networks and takes greater ownership interests in infrastructure used by the industry.
Owning more infrastructure can give MTN greater exposure to the growth it expects in African data use without requiring every rand of growth to come directly from an MTN mobile subscriber. It can also create an uncomfortable relationship with competitors that may depend on infrastructure in which MTN has a much larger economic interest. The IHS transaction therefore does more than add another business to the group; it tests how far MTN can integrate infrastructure into its strategy before regulators decide the advantages of integration have become a competition problem.
South Africa has already had to deal with similar questions around who controls telecoms infrastructure used by other providers. The Vuma-Herotel merger and the regulatory scrutiny around it involved a different market and a much smaller geographic footprint, but it also forced regulators to consider what consolidation changes when infrastructure ownership and access become concentrated. MTN and IHS operate at a different scale, which makes those questions harder to ignore.
South Africa is where the growth thesis looks least automatic
MTN’s home market is a reminder that the trajectory isn’t uniform across the continent. South African service revenue increased only 1.5% during the half, with postpaid up 4.9%, data up 4% and wholesale up 13.7%. Prepaid service revenue fell 3.3%, which MTN attributes mainly to its airtime-advance reset and continued substitution away from voice.
There are signs of improvement. Prepaid data revenue grew 4.4% during the half and accelerated from 3.8% in the first quarter to 5% in the second, while airtime-advance repayment rates improved from about 50% in October 2025 to roughly 70%. MTN has made the South African prepaid recovery one of its priorities for the second half of the year. The comparison with Nigeria and Ghana is still stark, though. MTN is operating in South Africa’s mature mobile market against intense competition, with less room to add first-time mobile users and consumers whose spending remains constrained. In other markets, subscriber bases are still expanding quickly while data consumption and mobile financial services are growing from a less mature starting point.
Ambition 2030 therefore depends on Africa being many different technology markets at once. What works in Nigeria may not produce the same growth in South Africa, while the opportunity for MoMo will depend heavily on the banking and regulatory conditions in each country. MTN’s scale gives it room to absorb those differences, but it also makes the strategy harder than simply rolling the same model across a map.
MTN says Ambition 2030 has moved “from articulation to execution”, and its H1 results provide the first useful evidence of what that execution could mean. If the company gets what it wants, the more difficult question by 2030 may not be whether MTN still qualifies as a telecoms operator. Regulators and competitors could instead be dealing with a company that remains one of Africa’s largest mobile networks while occupying a much larger position in the financial and physical systems built around that connectivity.