Mtn Group Ltd S/Adr

Good day to everyone and thank you for joining us once again to discuss the MTN Group Trading Update for the nine months ended September 2025. Apologies for starting five minutes late, but we'll give you the full hour in terms of the call. My name is Tato Mutlanti. I look after investor relations at the MTN Group. And on the call with me this afternoon, I've got Ralph Mupita, who is our Group President and CEO, as well as Solofelo Mulefe, who is our Group CFO. Our trading update was published this morning on the JSE and is posted on our website if you haven't had a chance to look as yet. You'll find it on the Investor Relations page. I trust that you've also seen the Q3 releases from our listed opcos. They published their results over the past few weeks and hopefully you were able to join their respective investor calls as well. In terms of the agenda for the day, the running order of the call will be as usual. 12 will get us underway with an overview of the operational performance. We'll be followed by Tzolu with an overview of our financial highlights and then Ralph will come back to wrap up with a few key focus areas as well as outlook comments. We'll then move into the Q&A section and I encourage you to send through your questions on the webcast platform and I will read those out towards the end of the call. Finally, as I said, just a reminder that this call is scheduled for about an hour at which point we'll close the call and with that let me hand over to Ralph.

Thank you Tata and a very good afternoon to you all, for me as well. In terms of our Q3 trading updates, we are pleased with the strong momentum coming through in the results. It reflects the improvements in our macroeconomic context, as well as the excellence in the execution of our teams across the markets. As mentioned, we'll cover three overall areas in our commentary this afternoon. I'll start with an operational overview, covering our commercial highlights, Before we get into the detail, let me outline the six key messages of our performance in the period. The first point as I mentioned is that we are really pleased with the strong growth delivered in our business. MTN Nigeria and MTN Ghana led this performance. But it was also very encouraging to see the momentum in some of the other OPCOs, particularly those we've been driving turnarounds. The second highlight is that as a group, we passed the 300 million customer mark in the last quarter. As you'll recall, this is a key strategic milestone for our Ambition 2025 strategy. However, it's especially important in the context of our commitment to connecting communities across Africa. As MTN, this milestone embodies our mission to spear the socio-economic and digital progress of our markets. And this starts with connectivity. Thirdly, we continue to expand our FinTech ecosystem with a transaction value of more than 340 billion year to date, which was up 38% year on year in constant currency terms. This was underpinned by the execution of our commercial strategies and how we leverage partners to scale the business. The fourth point to amplify is the trajectory of our EBITDA and margin which increased by 6.7% to 45% on a cost and currency basis. And this came on the back of very strong top line growth reported supported by our continuous efforts to drive expense efficiencies. The fifth highlight is the strength of our balance sheet and we are really pleased to have maintained healthy ratios which underpin the execution of our strategy. Solo will talk a bit more about these, but we improved our consolidated net debt to EBITDA to 0.4 times at the end of Q3. This was down from 0.7 times at the end of last year, whilst our HOBCO leverage stayed flat at 1.4 times. Of course, this was supported by the work we do to upstream cash from the HOBCOs. And linked to our final message is that MTN Nigeria has Equity Interpositive Positions in the timelines we previously guided. This was announced with MTN Nigeria's Q3 results, along with a resumption in dividend declarations. These are major milestones in the recovery journey of the business, and we commend the hard work of Carl and the team in Nigeria. MTN Nigeria has emerged strongly from a very challenging 18-20 hour period. In terms of our overall performance, we delivered strong overall service revenue growth of 22.6% for the nine months in cost and currency terms. This top line outcome was underpinned by data revenue which increased by 35.4% along with fintech revenue which grew 23.1%. And looking at our commercial KPIs, you'll see that we expanded our customer base to 301 million as I noted earlier reflecting growth of 5.8% year-on-year. Our active data subscribers were up 9.1% to close the period at just under 166 million and traffic was again up strongly increasing by 26.6% year-on-year. This gives us confidence in the ongoing structural demand and momentum within our data offering and we believe that the headroom for growth remains substantial. Within our fintech ecosystem, our active users rose by 5.3% year-on-year to 64.3%. Again, the underlying momentum is robust with fintech transaction volumes and value up 13.9% and 38% respectively. If we turn to the overall operational level, the performance of MTNSA continued to be impacted by the competitive pressures in the prepaid market. You would note that this has been an ongoing theme, especially within voice. And with the decline in prepaid of one point, overall service revenue growth for the period was 2%. Notwithstanding the prepaid Edwins, it's worth noting the important positives in the SA performance. It was pleasing to see the growth in MTN SA's aggregate data revenue, which was up 5% in the nine months. with an acceleration in growth to 6.4% in Q3. This was driven by strong growth in usage and traffic, including progress in our FWA and home initiatives. We're also encouraged by the solid performance in postpaid and enterprise, which helped the overall performance of MTNSA. These segments grew revenue by 4% and 12.3% respectively, and both also accelerated in the third quarter. And I think this is an important message to leave with you. Firstly, we're super focused on addressing the challenges in prepaid. I've spoken before about the investment we are making in our commercial offerings and distribution to recover prepaid performance. Secondly, we actually have some very positive momentum in some key segments where growth has accelerated in Q3 like data, post-paid enterprise. For MTN Nigeria, they reported a strong set of results at the end of September. In terms of the headline, they grew service revenue by 57.1%, with MQ3 up 62.9%. This outcome reflected a strong showing across the board. Data revenue increased by 72.7%, voice by 41.6%. We also had digital and fintech revenues up 42.9 and 72.3 respectively in the nine months. The momentum we see in MTN Nigeria was supported by resilient demand, disciplined execution and price adjustments. And as part of this, we accelerated capex in the market to ensure the capacity to meet the growing demand as well as quality of service obligations. To give you a sense, data traffic grew by 36.6% in the nine months, which demonstrates the structural demand, even in the context of price increase. The strong performance from MTN Nigeria, which was also supported by improved macro conditions, underpins its return to positive retained earnings and dividend payments. You'd have seen this from the announcement that MTN Nigeria Board approved an interim dividend of 5 Naira per share, For the Group, this will amount to a gross dividend of about R975 million, which we anticipate to receive in the course of Q4. In our markets portfolio, the SEA and WECA regions are growing their service revenue by 22% and 17.1% respectively. Key in market performance is that both regions delivered top-line growth well ahead of their blended inflation on an overall basis. MTM Ghana continued to lead growth with top line expansion of 35.9% and MTM Uganda was also a solid contributor to the overall result. What is quite important to call out in the markets context is that we're seeing good traction in a number of other operations. MTM Cameroon sustained a solid trajectory in the period. We also saw the likes of Cote d'Ivoire, Zambia, Rwanda and Sudan as markets that are showing encouraging traction in their commercial momentum. In terms of fintech, service revenue increased by 23.1% on a constant currency basis, with the growth being spearheaded by Ghana, Nigeria and Rwanda. We note earlier in the year that we're seeing increased competitive intensity and pricing pressures in some markets which we are currently navigating. This is presenting some headwinds to our overall growth trends. Importantly, however, we continue to drive up the contribution of advanced services, which was 33.4% in the period excluding extra time. This contribution increased by 3.8 percentage points on a year-on-year basis. In that regard, we're pleased with the progress we're making with our Mastercard commercial partnerships. We have now added Cote d'Ivoire to the list of markets where we've launched virtual cards. This brings the total to three markets with over 300,000 cards issued year-to-date so far. We also launched a money market product in Uganda and a mutual fund offering in Rwanda where we have seen early good adoption. These products enable our customers to save and invest, evolving our financial inclusion imperative to financial empowerment. So to summarize, I'd say we've executed well against the backdrop of improving macro conditions in some of our key markets. Whilst there are challenges, we continue to address these and we've been able to drive some good momentum in the growth of our business. Let me pause at this point and hand over to Tzulu who provides an overview of our financial results.

Thank you very much, Ralph, and a very good afternoon to everybody on the call. Thank you for joining us. And it is my pleasure to walk you through the financial overview of our performance over the first nine months of the year. As a headline, I would reiterate that we are pleased to present a strong set of financial results. These have been delivered against the backdrop of improved conditions and good execution by the various teams across MTN. In terms of the overall performance, we've seen group service revenue for the nine-month period under review going by 22.6% in constant currency. We sustained good momentum with growth in the September of 23%. On the connectivity side, we saw data revenue increase by 35.4% with strong growth of 37.2% maintained in quarter three. Voice is not on this slide, but you would have seen from the sense that we delivered resilient voice revenue growth of 10.8% for the period. In FinTech, we reported top line growth of 23.1% in the nine months, which reflected a little bit of a slowdown in the momentum in Q3 to 20.1%. Ralph talked about some of the competitive and pricing pressures coming through there in some of our markets and the work we are doing to accelerate the business. Advanced services within FinTech continued to be strong, in line with our strategic focus for the business, and grew by 39.5%. Constant currency EBITDA margin for the nine months was up by a pleasing 6.7 percentage points to 45%. really reflecting the turnaround in the profitability of our business with Q3 margins up now at 46.6%. Over and above the strong overall top-line growth, we continued to implement our expense efficiency initiatives to support the profit growth. EBITDA in the reporting period expanded by 41.1% year-on-year. Turning to the performance of MTN South Africa in the period under review, service revenue increased by 2% with some slowdown in Q3 specifically. As Ralph covered, some of the drivers behind this, which is largely due to ongoing pressures in prepaid and prepaid voice. Of course, we are encouraged by the improving trends in segments like data and enterprise overall, along with consumer postpaid, which have mitigated the downside. MTNSA's EBITDA reported margin was 0.6 percentage points at 5.8%, which included the impact for gains and losses from tower disposals. Excluding these, the underlying margin was lower by 0.4 percentage points, The trend you see in Q3, which was 34.5%, reflects the top line pressures we have spoken about and the investments we are making in optimizing pricing and our distribution. We also talked about these interventions in our Q1 and half year end reporting. Touching on MTN Nigeria's performance, we see very strong top line growth with service revenue growth of 57.1% for the nine months and 62.9% in the quarter. Very much a reflection of good execution in the market with growth across all the key segments and supported by improved macros and price revisions. The EBITDA margin in Nigeria of 51.3% was up by 15 percentage points on the back of robust revenue development as well as expense efficiencies. We continue to see the benefits of the renegotiated Tower Lease contracts in Nigeria along with relative stability in the macroeconomic drivers like inflation and FX. Now moving to the markets portfolio, the markets continued to perform very well overall, with SEER and Weka growing their service revenue by 22% and 17.1% respectively, both quite comfortably ahead of blended inflation rates. For SEER, there was a tick-up in service revenue growth momentum, which was 22.2%, in Q3. The overall margin also trended in a positive direction and this was up 3.2 percentage points for the 9 months to 48.4%. The margin of 48.9% in Q3 was also quite pleasing. If we look at MTN Uganda, they delivered another strong performance, growing service revenue by 13.6% with a 2.1 percentage point improvement in EBITDA margin to 53.8%. Good momentum in that business, despite the effects of the mobile termination rates cut implemented in Q4 last year. You will also see from the slide the trend in EBITDA margin which held quite a firm at 54.1% in Q3. MTN Uganda continued to sustain its margin comfortably ahead of its medium term target threshold of above 50%. The Weka region delivered a margin of 46.6%, which was up by 4 percentage points. Again, we are pleased with the trajectory of EBITDA margin, which came in at 48.1%. It reflects some of the momentum and turnaround we are seeing in markets like Cameroon as well as Cote d'Ivoire. MTN Ghana within worker grew its top line by 35.9% for the 9-month period, which was very strong, albeit with an abating trend to 29.9% in Q3. A couple of factors informing this. Firstly, the telco industry in Ghana gave back 15% to customers in data offerings from July in cooperation with the regulator there. This impacted data revenue development. Second, there is the ongoing shift from traditional voice calls to voice over IP services. In fact, this was actually somewhat exacerbated by the additional value given to customers in data bundles. MTN Ghanous once again delivered an attractive margin of 58.4% in the period under review, reflecting an expansion of 2.3% points. As a final point here, just a reminder that this will be the last time you see the structure that you see on the slide. From the full year reporting, you can expect to see our operations as disclosed in line with our new structure that was announced 1st of November. Finally, just a few remarks on our financial profile. I will start with CapEx. We disclosed in the sense that we deployed CapEx of $27.9 billion, excluding leases, with CapEx intensity of 16.8%, and this is around the midpoint of the range we target over the medium term. Overall, we remain on track to exit the current financial year within the guidance range, or trade off between 33 to 38 billion probably towards the upper end of that as we invest to sustain our growth momentum. This is supported by our balance sheet which is in good shape consolidated net debt to EBITDA improved to 0.4 times as at September compared to 0.7 times as at December 2024. In the meantime, our whole core over the same period held steady at 1.4 times. So it does remain within a 1.5 times Upstreaming from OPCOS of cash which is tracking well and came in at 11.9 billion YTD. This indicates upstreaming of 3.7 billion rand in this quarter 3. In this context, we've maintained a very healthy liquidity position with hedge room of $36.9 billion as at the end of September 2025. Post the period end in October, we raised about $2.3 billion from our DMT program to refinance existing maturities and further bolster whole core liquidity. So overall, we remain and we retain We continue to implement our disciplined capital allocation to sustain our growth ambitions and safeguard the health and flexibility of our balance sheet. As we regularly highlight, this is a crucial enabler for strategy execution and growth outlook. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I will now hand over to Ralph.