MTN’s Growth Story Is Now Bigger Than South Africa

MTN’s latest numbers show that the group’s next growth story is increasingly being written outside South Africa.

In its H1 2026 results announcement, MTN said service revenue rose 22.7 percent in constant currency, EBITDA grew 23.6 percent and adjusted headline earnings per share rose 21.3 percent. The company also initiated a share buyback programme.

The fintech numbers are the part African tech readers should watch. MTN said it had 70.8 million active Mobile Money users, with fintech transaction value rising by more than a third to $330 billion in the first half. Transaction volumes increased 17 percent to 13 billion.

That scale turns MoMo into more than a wallet. It is now one of Africa’s most important financial rails, carrying payments, transfers, merchant activity, lending, insurance and other digital financial services across multiple markets.

Nigeria and Ghana remain central to the story. Nigeria’s recovery after years of macroeconomic pressure gives MTN a much stronger earnings base, while Ghana continues to show the importance of mobile money, data and digital services in West Africa.

This is why MTN’s growth should not be read only as a telecoms story. The company is increasingly a connectivity, fintech and digital-infrastructure platform. Data revenue, mobile money and enterprise services are becoming more important than the old voice-led model.

We recently wrote about Ericsson and MTN moving MoMo onto cloud across four African markets. That cloud migration makes more sense when you look at the transaction scale MTN is now handling.

The opportunity is large, but the pressure is also real. Regulators will keep watching mobile money, data pricing, financial services, cybersecurity and market dominance. A platform with this many users cannot behave like a small fintech experiment.

MTN also has to keep balancing markets. South Africa remains important, but the strongest growth narrative is now coming from markets where data adoption, fintech penetration and population growth still have more room to run.

The message from H1 is clear: MTN is still a telecoms company, but its most interesting future may be as one of Africa’s largest digital-finance and infrastructure platforms.