MTN subscriber numbers, close to 200 million

This is unusual from MTN, releasing subscriber numbers at the beginning of the day, I am used to releases in the middle of the session. Check it out: MTN Group records 195,4 million subscribers. These are subscriber numbers for the first quarter to end March 2013. Across the group, for the 1st quarter versus the prior quarter, MTN grew their base to 195.388 million folks. A 25 million addition from the same quarter this time last year, hardly sounds like ex-growth to me. But of course there are questions about saturated markets, that is almost always true. You can't add reams of subscribers when you reach a level where the number of subscribers exceeds the population. That does not mean that users cannot use multiple sim cards. Locally, their pre-paid environment saw a soft patch, perhaps the price wars are starting to pay off a little for Cell C, although the war on their bank account will be more. Should they worry? Well, yes and no. There is certainly a mountain of money at HQ, 216 14th Avenue in Fairlands, whilst I am not so sure the same exists at Cell C, 10 Rivonia Road in Sandton.


Nigeria grew their subscriber base strongly, up 8.1 percent to 51.295 million. There are now more subscribers in Nigeria than there are people in South Africa. Iran grew their base strongly too, to 41.5 million folks. Outside of South Africa, Ghana is the only other country where subscribers are above 10 million, now at 12 million and some change. That was an increase of 2,5 percent on the quarter. In Syria, where there is still a civil war, the connections shrank 6 percent. In Cyprus the number of connections was unchanged really, it is their smallest territory at 312 thousand customers. Spending on average of only 24.18 Dollars per month. Which is almost double of what it is in South Africa.


The concerns around lower ARPU's (average revenue per user) are warranted, they are falling. And in particular I guess that South Africa is a sign of things to come. Blended ARPU's here fell 8.1 percent quarter on quarter to 110.62 ZAR per month. Post paid fell 6.3 percent to 222.34 ZAR whilst pre-paid fell hard, down 9.6 percent to 86.05 ZAR per month. In terms of separating the pre and post paid, out of the 24.950 million subscribers in South Africa, only 4.636 million are post paid subscribers. That is all. Only 18 percent of all MTN subscribers in South Africa have a contract and quite possibly a much better handset, because of the subsidies. And most of those users are data consumers. Amazingly, across the group, data revenue is up 42.2 percent. MTN says that across their networks active data subscribers have increased to 13.3 million. That means that there are many more people consuming data, who are not pre paid subscribers.

It is laughable when you throw back to the results from a decade ago. There were only 6.661 million people on the entire network as at the end of December 2002. Of those, 3.944 million were in South Africa, of which 928 thousand were post paid customers. ARPU's in Nigeria were 7 times higher. So, mobile phones are cheaper to use, a whole lot cheaper to use. And they certainly make your life a whole lot easier. Whatsapp, that has changed the way that people communicate. SMS was not viewed as a proper way to communicate back then. In an age where twitter has a limited number of characters, SMS's are short and sharp.


The companies operating in Sub Saharan Africa are all benefitting from an uplift in economic activity at a much faster pace than at any other time, since most countries obtained independence post world war two. The cycle of mass conflicts are fewer, the number of completely impoverished regions are slowly diminishing. You want to be operating in this economic environment, where the telecommunication options are almost entirely restricted to mobile telephony. The fixed line infrastructure has been "missed". Mobile is truly mobile. We continue to add to MTN on weakness, the next numbers are due in the first two weeks of August. The market has lifted the stock a lot this week, thanks to competitor Vodacom's positive trading statement and these subscriber numbers.