Event
MTN Nigeria Plc (‘the Company’) sustained its solid momentum in Q3 2022. Revenue grew by 22% year-on-year to N506.05bn in Q3 2022. Data revenue remained the growth engine by delivering a 45% YoY growth, thus contributing over two-thirds of the total revenue growth achieved in Q3 2022. Increases in active data users (+15% YoY), data traffic (71% YoY), and data usage (+52% to 6.6GB per subscriber) supported data demand during the period.
Voice revenue grew by 8% YoY, despite the bottlenecks related to NIN registration. According to management, churn levels increased materially in Q3 2022 due to suspended lines that failed to reactivate. Instead, the subscribers purchased new sims, and the trend reflected in accelerated gross connections, which supported a 10% YoY growth in the mobile subscriber base to 74mn.
The activities in the fintech segment slowed in Q3 2022 due to an intentional decision by the management to suspend activities of the PSB business to strengthen internal controls following a recent operational issue. However, revenue from the fintech business grew by 12% YoY in Q3 2022. The management guided that commercial operations would resume in Q4 2022. A CEO-designate, Eli Hini, was appointed to drive the PSB business. Eli Hini ran the mobile money business of MTN Ghana from scratch.
Outlook
We maintain a positive outlook for the Company. We leave our FY 2022 earnings per share unchanged at N18.71. We expect increased data demand to continue driving growth amid increased 4G and 5G rollouts. We also expect voice revenue to perform better than the previous quarters, owing to improved gross connections and subscriber base. The Company’s tower contract with partners relatively immunises it from the rising energy costs. However, there are still other areas where the Company faces rising cost pressures (e.g., lease rentals).
Overall, we do not expect a significant downside risk to operating costs. Meanwhile, we expect to see higher finance costs in the near term due to tightened conditions of the financial markets. At the current market price of N188.00, the stock trades at 10x forward price-to-earnings multiple – a steep discount of 54% to our justified price-to-earnings multiple of 15.48x. Hence, we recommend a BUY.
Please follow the link “MTN Nigeria Plc Q3 2022 – Cost Optimisation Boosts Earnings” to view the whole report.
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