The telecommunications giant’s Financial report for 2020 shows great performance from the previous year. It is reported that MTN Uganda’s revenue in 2020 grew by 9.5% with an increase in revenue to UGX 1.9 trillion, a contribution made by the increase in user base and usage in data and mobile money services. The numbers of active data and mobile money users show double-digit growth because of the increase in smartphone users since 2019.
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How MTN Uganda’s revenue in 2020 rose from 2019
MTN data users grew by 34.8% to 4.6 million subscribers as the company recorded peaks in April 2020 compared to December 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company benefitted from higher data traffic as many were forced to shift some of their daily activities online like work and studies causing a rise in spending on data. As a result of tight COVID-19 restrictions, people were limited to a few activities that saw most of them channelling money they would have otherwise spent on other activities going into data.
The number of data users is not the only one that has risen because of the pandemic, active MoMo users have also gone up from 7.4 million to 8.5 million increasing MTN Uganda’s revenue in 2020 currently because of initiatives by the company like the zero rate on transactions during the coronavirus pandemic. This was a move by the company to reduce expenses seeing as many were cut off from their sources of income during that time.
Currently, MTN Uganda enjoys a wide user base with the number of subscribers going up to 14.2 million users from 2019’s 12.6 million users. Uganda has seen a general increase in the number of smartphone users implying digital inclusion according to a report by the Uganda Communications Commission. By March 2020, it was recorded that an 7,091,860 million people owned smartphones and had access to internet.
MTN Uganda’s revenue in 2020 has also grown because of initiatives to encourage this digital inclusion. In December it launched its device payment plan that lets people buy phones on credit and pay back with time. MTN customers can deposit an initial amount and then pay the rest back according to the conditions of the loan. The company did this to make smartphones more affordable hence increasing numbers of people that can get access to the internet.
Read more: Why you cannot afford to miss out on MTN’s new device payment plan.
A review of the financial report shows that it wasn’t only MTN Uganda’s revenue in 2020 that improved greatly, the telecommunications’ branches in countries like Nigeria with revenue up by 14.6%, Ghana contributed 16.6% and South Africa by 1.6% bringing MTN’s total revenue to $11 billion.
For the full report, click this LINK.
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