BY DAYO ADESULU
MTN Nigeria in 2019 has made a profit of N202.1m, signifying 38.8 per cent growth in the company’s full-year audited financial report released.
The growth in profit underscores reasons the MTN declared a final dividend of N4.97 kobo per share as recommended by the Board of Directors on Friday.
It reports states that in the year ended December 31, 2019, mobile subscribers increased by 6.1 million to reach 64.3 million.
Also, active data users increased by 6.5 million to 25.2 million while service revenue increased by 12.6 per cent to N1.2tn.
In his reaction, MTN Nigeria Chief Executive Officer, Ferdi Moolman said the company closed the year with 132 cities covered by 4G and became the first mobile network operator in West Africa to demonstrate the capability of 5G technology.
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He said the company had made significant progress in resolving the dispute with the Attorney General of the Federation on the adequacy of taxes and duties paid.
“We have discontinued the legal action against the AGF following the transfer of the matter to the relevant authorities and look forward to a final resolution. We have always fulfilled our tax obligations and remain committed to maintaining good relationships with all regulatory authorities,” Moolman added.
His words: “In total, we added 6.1 million new subscribers to our network in 2019. Although the last quarter is usually seasonally strong, service revenue growth (14 per cent) in Q4 outpaced the seasonal effect.
“In the third quarter, we focused on several initiatives to enhance coverage and drive data usage penetration. These initiatives include optimising frequencies, expanding our 4G network coverage with over 6,000 additional sites leveraging 800MHz spectrum and repositioning our commercial data offerings.
“It is pleasing to note that the promising results we reported at the end of Q3 2019 accelerated in the fourth quarter. Corresponding with the increase in our active data subscriber net additions by 2.9 million in Q4 2019, our 4G population coverage rose by 8.4pp to 43.8 per cent, giving people in 68 additional cities access to 4G.”
