Nigeria And Ghana Fuel MTN Q1 Growth, Begins It’s 5G Tests Outdoors
The Oasis Reporters
June 14, 2018
The South African mobile giant MTN has it’s stars to thank for the monumental incompetence and selfishness of lacklustre Nigerian rulers in the last fifty years that made telecoms an exclusive preserve of the rich. It should also thank it’s stars for democracy and openness initiated by Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo who opened up the space to foreign investments and MTN took the plunge. They are rich today because they invested in the population high Nigeria and now their Quarter One growth is driven mainly by cash receipts from Nigeria and Ghana.
Meanwhile the moribund Nigerian telephone network, NITEL has remained buried with no hope of resurrection.
MTN reported a 9.1% year-on-year increase in service revenues for its first quarter of 2018 and in order not to be static as Nigeria’s NITEL was, the telecoms giant has started pushing at the mobile broadband boundaries, and taken its 5G development program outdoors with a field trial, Africa’s first, conducted with networking systems giant Huawei Technologies.
Further growth prospects have buoyed hopes, and MTN Ghana has started its IPO process that will see it listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange later in the year. The country’s leading mobile operator is offering almost 4.64 billion shares to investors — 35% of its total stock — and hopes to raise 3.47 billion Ghanaian cedis (US$743 million) in a listing that would value the operator at about GHS 10 billion ($2.1 billion).
In another development, South Africa’s MTN is using technology from China’s Huawei that allows it to share spectrum between 2G, 3G and 4G services, instead of allocating resources entirely to one network in its home country according to
Iain Morris, a specialist writer on telecommunications.
