MTN Group grew service revenue 17.5% to R115bn in the six months to 30 June 2026, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, excluding once-off items, rose by almost a quarter to R56bn, delivering the group’s strongest margins on record. The results mark the first full half-year under Ambition 2030, the strategy MTN launched earlier this year to guide its next phase of growth.
Alongside the numbers, the group advanced two strategic moves it had been working on for months: a proposed buyout of the remaining shares in tower company IHS Holdings, and a new share buyback programme. MTN will repurchase 31 million ordinary shares for up to R6bn, the latest step in a shareholder remuneration framework that commits to returning between 40% and 60% of equity free cash flow through dividends or buybacks.
Growth was broad-based but uneven. Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon led the advance, while MTN South Africa lagged with service revenue up just 1.5%, a figure the group attributes to the near-term cost of deliberately resetting the quality of its large prepaid base rather than chasing volume.
| Metric | H1 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Group service revenue | R115bn | +17.5% |
| EBITDA (pre once-off items) | R56bn | +almost 25% |
| Capital expenditure | approximately R20bn | — |
| Total subscribers | 317.7m across 19 markets | — |
| Active data users | over 179m | traffic +23% |
| MTN SA service revenue | — | +1.5% (Q2: +2.3%) |
| Fintech transaction value | roughly R5.3 trillion | +more than a third |
In South Africa, subscribers slipped marginally to 39.5m, of which 28.2m are prepaid. MTN said the prepaid reset is showing encouraging signs, including fewer customers relying on airtime advances to recharge and a shift toward bank-linked recharges, changes it expects to produce higher-quality subscriber growth over time. Postpaid, enterprise and wholesale performed better, helping South African service revenue growth accelerate to 2.3% in the second quarter from 0.7% in the first.
The larger story is the pending IHS deal. MTN already owns 24.7% of the tower operator, its largest supplier of leased mast infrastructure, and agreed in February to buy the remaining stake for about $2.2bn, or roughly R35bn, cash, valuing IHS at an enterprise value near $6.2bn, or about R99bn. IHS shareholders approved the transaction on 4 August with the required two-thirds majority, and it has since cleared several regulatory hurdles, including Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. As a condition of approval, MTN will sell down 30% of IHS’s Nigerian business to local investors. Completion is expected in the second half of 2026, which would bring close to 29,000 towers across six MTN markets, Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon, Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire and Zambia, back under direct MTN ownership.
The move reverses a strategy MTN itself pioneered more than a decade ago, when it began selling towers to specialist operators such as IHS to cut debt and sharpen its focus on network services. That relationship has not always been smooth: a 2024 dispute over expiring Nigerian lease terms saw roughly 2,500 towers split between IHS and rival operator American Tower before the two sides reached a renegotiated agreement.
Currency movements shaped the numbers too. Blended inflation across MTN’s markets eased to 9.3% from 14% a year earlier, and most local currencies held broadly steady against the dollar, but weakened against the rand, muting reported growth. Nigeria was a notable exception: a firmer naira, which closed the half at 1,380 to the dollar against 1,530 a year prior, helped swing MTN Nigeria to a net foreign exchange gain and contributed to a 70.6% jump in that unit’s profit.
MTN Group president and CEO Ralph Mupita described the period as reflecting strong conversion of commercial momentum into earnings, cash flow and shareholder returns, and reaffirmed the group’s medium-term guidance despite ongoing geopolitical and currency risk.