MTN Plans 8m Additional Subscribers This Year

The MTN group plans to add eight million new subscribers by the end of its financial year, with 1.1 million of those coming from SA, according to a report on itweb.com.

This after a tough year for the telecoms giant, which was forced to disconnect 18 million customers across the group, in the past nine months, as part of new regulations in a number of its operations.

MTN struggled to add many new subscribers during the six months to 30 June 2016, reporting a fairly flat 232.6 million total subscribers compared to 232.5 million in December 2015. This as subscriber registration processes in a number of its territories put pressure on customer numbers by forcing non-complying subscribers to be dropped.

The group was forced to disconnect 6.6 million subscribers over the six-month period in Nigeria, Uganda and Cameroon. Since October 2015, approximately 18 million subscribers across the group's 22 operations were disconnected to ensure compliance with various subscriber registration processes.

Executive chairman Phuthuma Nhleko says that as far as customer disconnections are

concerned, he believes the group "broke the back of this last year" to become as compliant as possible.

"In past years, we have sometimes added 20 million subscribers, but of course because of all of these very significant disconnections, we have had to start from a very low base and reconnect those subscribers, so we are hoping to add eight million subscribers by the end of the year," he said at the group's interim results presentation on Friday.

MTN Nigeria disconnected its last batch of 4.5 million subscribers in February, while MTN Uganda and MTN Cameroon were also impacted by subscriber registration requirements during the last six months.

MTN now has 58.9 million subscribers in Nigeria and hopes to boost that by at least another 800 000 by the end of the year. MTN aims to add 1.8 million customers in Ghana, one million in Cameroon and 475 000 in the Ivory Coast during the second half of 2016.

MTN Uganda increased its subscriber base by almost 11% for the six months to June, to 9.9 million, boosting its numbers back up after it was forced to disconnect 3.7 million subscribers in the second half of 2015. MTN Uganda aims to add 950 000 more in the second half of 2016.

MTN South Africa's subscriber numbers dropped 2.6%, to 29.8 million − mainly as a result of strong competition and economic pressure in a highly penetrated market. The prepaid and postpaid segments declined by 2.7% to 24.7 million and 2.1% to 5.1 million, respectively.

In SA, MTN remains in second place in terms of subscriber numbers behind Vodacom's 35.1 million customers. Cell C has around 24 million subscribers, while Telkom trails the pack with 2.7 million mobile customers.

In general, MTN SA reported "a lower-than-expected performance" in the first half of the year, which the group says was negatively impacted by network outages in some areas, competition and economic pressure on consumer spending.