Revenue for the quarter ended 31 March rose 15.4 per cent to $1.04 billion, the company said in a statement Wednesday.
“Our performance has been strong, with reported growth of 13.6 per cent in underlying revenue and 18.3 per cent in underlying EBITDA, and constant currency growth of 19.4 per cent and 25.2 per cent, respectively. Contributions to this growth came across all regions, with particular improvement in Francophone Africa, and across all our major services, with mobile money, data and voice each posting double-digit revenue growth,” Raghunath Mandava, chief executive officer, Airtel Africa, said in the statement.
“Our customer base also grew strongly for most of the year with new customer registration requirements in Nigeria stemming our onboarding of new customers in the final quarter, and these restrictions were lifted in second half of April,” the outgoing CEO, who will be replaced by Airtel Nigeria’s Olusegun “Segun” Ogunsanya, said.
Airtel’s subscriber base across 14 countries in Africa declined 1 per cent on-quarter to 118.2 million users but monthly churn rate dropped to 3.9 per cent, the lowest in the last five years. In the whole year, the subscriber base grew 6.9 per cent. The average revenue per user (ARPU) grew 6.6 per cent on year to $2.9 in the January-March period.
Data revenue grew 24.2 per cent on annual basis to $315. Although growth in voice revenue was the slowest at 7.2 per cent, it remains to be the largest contributing segment with revenue of $547 in the fourth quarter.
Data customer base at the end of March, 2021 was 40.6 million and voice minutes users were 118.2 million.
The mobile money segment continued to be the fastest growing with revenue growth of 32.7 per cent on-year to $110 million. Active mobile money user base increased 18.5 per cent to 21.7 million while mobile money ARPU was up 6 per cent on-year to $1.7.
In March, the company announced an investment of $200 million by TPG’s Rise Fund and $100 million by Mastercard in Airtel Mobile Commerce BV (“AMC BV”), a wholly owned subsidiary of Airtel Africa plc valuing the mobile money business at at $2.65 billion on a cash and debt free basis.
AMC BV is the holding company for several of Airtel Africa’s mobile money operations and is intended to own and operate the mobile money businesses across all of Airtel Africa’s 14 operating countries.
“In line with our strategy of unlocking value in our mobile money business, we will soon welcome two new minority investors (The Rise Fund and Mastercard) in agreed transactions which value this part of our business at $2.65 billion, as well as bringing $300 million into the Group. We have also agreed to sell more of our tower portfolio, yielding yet more cash for the business,” Mandava said.
