MTN Ghana’s shareholders to get dividend of 4 pesewas per share
MTN Ghana is set to pay out a dividend of 4 pesewas per share to shareholders following its strong 2019 financial performance.
The company last week released its financials where it declared a profit after tax of GH¢1 billion representing more than 33.5 percent the figure it recorded in 2018.
A press release issued by the country’s largest mobile network operator said after the strong performance, the board agreed to an interim dividend of 2 pesewas per share.
However, after reviewing the full-year performance of the company, “the board of MTN Ghana shall be recommending a final dividend of 4 pesewas per share, bringing the total dividend for the 2019 year to 6 pesewas per share. This represents 73.1 percent of profit after tax and a 20 percent increase in dividend per share.”
Strong performance
MTN Ghana delivered a strong performance for the year in a competitive industry, maintaining market leadership with 55.21%2 market share.
Service revenue increased by 22.8% year-on-year (YoY), underpinned by growth in revenue from voice, data and Mobile Money.
Double-digit growth in voice revenue (up 19.4% YoY) was driven by an increase in the number of active subscribers* (+11.2%), the benefits of various customer value management (CVM) initiatives and pro-consumer activity, as well as continued improvements to our network. As new lines of revenue continued to grow much faster than the traditional business, voice revenue’s contribution to service revenue decreased from 46.3% to 45.0%.
Solid data revenue growth (up 32.5% YoY) was attributable to growth in active data users (+26.6%), growth in the number of smartphones (+18.5%) on the network and an increase in data usage (up 85.9% to 256,301 Terabyte). Data revenue’s contribution to service revenue expanded from 26.3% to 28.4%.
Mobile Money revenue continued to grow strongly (up 28 %) in a year in which we marked the 10th anniversary of MoMo in Ghana. MoMo growth was attributable to an increase in the number of active subscribers* (+8.9%), commissions on cash-in-cash-out transactions, increased transactional activity of person-to-person (P2P) transactions as well as good growth in more advanced services – such as retail merchant payments. MoMo revenue’s contribution to service revenue expanded from 17.9% to 18.6%.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) grew by 65.7% with a YoY EBITDA margin expansion of 13.2 pp to 50.8%. Under IAS 17 and adjusting for the management fee, the like-for-like EBITDA margin expanded by 5.9 pp to 43.5% (2018 EBITDA margin: 37.6%). The margin improvement was supported by lower operating expenses, prudent revenue initiatives as well as distribution efficiencies.
