MTN Group has used Africa Day on Monday to reaffirm its Pan-African identity and outline its ambitions for the continent’s digital future, releasing a statement that frames the telecoms giant’s three-decade expansion as both an economic commitment and a cultural one.
The Johannesburg-listed group, which was founded in South Africa in 1994 and is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) under the share code MTN, confirmed that in 2025 it generated R150 billion in economic value-added across its African markets, contributed R61.1 billion in total taxes and invested R38.5 billion in capital expenditure to strengthen digital and physical infrastructure.
“Our continent has enormous potential, and we are committed to helping unlock this through our networks and platforms,” said MTN Group President and Chief Executive Officer Ralph Mupita in the Africa Day statement.
The figures accompany a broader financial turnaround. MTN reported a profit of R27 billion for 2025, reversing a loss of R10.9 billion in 2024, while service revenue grew 22.7% in constant currency, the group’s strongest performance in nearly two decades. Its subscriber base crossed 300 million customers for the first time, reaching 307.2 million across its markets, while its fintech platform processed over 23 billion transactions with a total value exceeding $500 billion during the year.
The group employs 15,000 people representing 74 nationalities across 19 markets. Of the 1,730 people who joined MTN and its subsidiaries in 2025, 87% were hired locally within the countries where they originate. MTN’s corporate social investment for 2025 totalled R269 million, reaching approximately 2.3 million people, most of them youth.
Mupita highlighted the strategic importance of MTN’s stock market listings in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Rwanda as instruments of localisation and value creation, arguing that shared African ownership of digital infrastructure is central to the continent’s economic sovereignty.
The Africa Day statement also anchors MTN’s newly launched Ambition 2030 strategy, which targets expansion across three platforms: connectivity, fintech and digital infrastructure. As part of that strategy, MTN this year made an all-cash offer of $2.2 billion to acquire the remaining 75% of IHS Towers, Africa’s largest cellphone tower operator, a move that signals a significant shift in how the group intends to control and scale its physical infrastructure footprint.
Mupita argued that Africa’s demographic advantage, with its youth set to represent the world’s largest workforce by 2040, makes investment in digital inclusion a strategic economic imperative rather than a social obligation.
