Airtel Africa grows revenue by 14.2% in Q1

Airtel Africa Plc on Wednesday reported a 14.2 per cent ($3.91billion) growth in income in its Q1 2021 earnings.

The company said it recorded revenue growth across all its regions: Nigeria by 21.9 per cent; East Africa by 23.5 per cent and Francophone Africa by 10 per cent.

Revenues for voice was up by 11 per cent, data was up 31.2 per cent and mobile money was up 35.5 per cent.

Chief Executive Officer, Airtel Africa Plc, Raghunath Mandava, in a statement on Wednesday, said, “In these challenging times, I want to say a huge thank you to all our employees, our business partners, and governments and regulators who have supported us, and in turn facilitated our continued support to the economies and communities we serve.

“Our performance has been strong, with reported growth of 13.6 per cent in underlying revenue and 18.3 per cent in underlying EBITDA, and constant currency growth of 19.4 per cent and 25.2 per cent respectively.

“Contributions to this growth came across all regions, with particular improvement in Francophone Africa, and across all our major services, with mobile money, data and voice each posting double-digit revenue growth.

“Our customer base also grew strongly for most of the year with new customer registration requirements in Nigeria stemming our onboarding of new customers in the final quarter, and these restrictions were lifted in second half of April.”

The company’s operating profit increased by 24.2 per cent to $1.12 billion in reported currency, and by 32.8 per cent in constant currency. Free cash flow was up by 42.8 per cent $647million on the prior year.

The company grew its customer base by 6.9 per cent to 118.2 million, with increased penetration across mobile data (customer base up 14.5 per cent ) and mobile money services (customer base up 18.5 per cent).

However, it witnessed slowdown in customer base growth due to new SIM registration regulations in Nigeria.