MTN group CFO Tsholofelo Molefe discusses the company's 2023 performance and its focus going forward.
You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here. ADVERTISEMENT CONTINUE READING BELOW JIMMY MOYAHA: The MTN group this morning reported full-year financial results for the financial year ended 31 December 2023. Now, MTN has a number of businesses throughout the African continent that report results in their own time. MTN Rwanda, MTN Ghana and MTN Nigeria all report leading up to this particular report, and this is a consolidated report of the entire group’s activity.
The FX impact and rising inflation have particularly had an impact on our cost. So high cost growth year on year, therefore resulting in margin dilution of about 1.2 percentage points in constant currency. We saw significant impacts coming from Nigeria due to FX losses, which was due to the naira devaluation during the year. You will note that there was a unification of the exchange rate following the new administration coming to power in Nigeria back in June 2023.
I think, of course, as we indicated, this does have an impact on our tower contracts, as I was explaining earlier on – which are really denominated in dollars. So we obviously have to make adjustments, most of which are accounting-related and impact our lease liabilities and impact the net finance cost line on the income statement. So it does impact on our profit-after-tax margins.
JIMMY MOYAHA: Almost 300 million subscribers. There is certainly growth that any company can hold its head up high about. But we started seeing some improvement on the voice trend quarterly – voice trend in the past few quarters from a South Africa perspective. So we are hopeful that there will be continued improvement on the voice side.
TSHOLOFELO MOLEFE: It’s a function of obviously the economic challenges in those markets. I think what’s important is that as these inflation levels go up in markets like Sudan, South Sudan previously – although South Sudan has been able to get out of hyperinflation this year – we were able to get the relevant tariff increases in the markets to be able to make up for high inflationary markets.
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