For the first time in what has been a gruelling multi-year battle with currency devastation, hyperinflation, and regional conflict, MTN Group has emerged with a convincing profit. 

The Pan-African mobile giant recorded a profit after tax of R27.4 billion for the year ended 31 December 2025, swinging decisively from a restated loss of R10.9 billion the prior year. 

The magnitude of the reversal is difficult to overstate and behind it sits a single, transformative story as Nigeria found its footing again.

The Nigerian business generated R61.7 billion in total revenue in 2025, up from R41 billion a year earlier, a 50% expansion in rand terms that tells you everything about how deeply the naira's freefall in 2023 and 2024 had distorted the group's reported performance. 

MTN Nigeria's EBITDA more than doubled to R32.5 billion from R16 billion, producing a margin improvement that rewrote the group's earnings profile almost single-handedly.

 The lease renegotiation completed with IHS in 2024, which converted the majority of Nigeria's infrastructure lease obligations from dollar-indexed to naira-based terms and capped CPI escalations at 20%, proved its value in 2025 as stabilised costs amplified the operational recovery. 

In a year when Nigeria's corporate tax rate drops from 30% to 25% effective 2026, the structural tailwinds are not finished.

What makes MTN's Nigerian revival analytically compelling is that it was not a passive currency story. The business added genuine commercial depth. 

The fintech and digital revenue line for Nigeria climbed to R3.5 billion from R2.2 billion, a 58% rise that reflects growing traction in mobile money and digital services among a subscriber base that, at over 80 million connections, remains one of the largest on the continent. 

MTN Nigeria's 5G rollout is still in capital deployment phase. The financials reflect ongoing work-in-progress investment in network infrastructure, but the foundations being laid now will shape competitive positioning for the next decade in Africa's most populous market.

West and Central Africa delivered the group's second engine of growth. The WECA segment, which is anchored by Ghana and Cameroon, grew total revenue to R72.1 billion from R58 billion, while EBITDA surged to R34.2 billion from R25.4 billion. 

Ghana's performance was the headline act. The country's exit from hyperinflationary accounting status during 2025, Ghana's three-year cumulative inflation fell below 100% removed a significant layer of distortion from reported results. MTN Ghana revenue reached R35.7 billion from R22.6 billion, and EBITDA climbed to R21.5 billion from R14.3 billion. The group's ongoing localisation strategy in Ghana, including the disposal of shares as part of market listing requirements, continued through the year without disrupting operational momentum. Critically, all of MTN Ghana's secured debt facilities matured and were derecognised during 2025, eliminating the encumbrances on the company's network assets and significantly strengthening the balance sheet position of that operation.

MoMo deposits in the WECA region tell a story of scale that often goes underreported. Total current MoMo deposits held on behalf of customers in the WECA cluster reached R79.5 billion at year-end, against R48.4 billion in 2024, a 64% surge that is dominated by Ghana where MoMo deposits reached R60.3 billion from R30.6 billion. That trajectory reflects not just user growth but the deepening of wallet activity and the formalisation of mobile money as a primary financial tool in markets where conventional banking penetration remains limited. 

The MoMo platform in these markets is evolving from a remittance and payment utility into a full financial services layer, and the rate at which deposits are accumulating on the platform gives a forward indicator of the monetisation opportunity ahead.

In the Southern and East Africa cluster, Uganda continued its steady progression. Revenue for the SEA segment rose to R28 billion from R24.5 billion, with Uganda contributing R17.9 billion. Uganda's fintech revenue of R5.6 billion accounted for nearly a third of the operation's total revenue, a ratio that places Uganda among the most fintech-intensive operations in the group. The localisation process in Uganda, through which MTN reduced its stake to comply with regulatory requirements, was completed without material disruption.

The one shadow that stretched across the full year was Sudan. The conflict there has reduced MTN's presence to a rump operation generating R2.2 billion in revenue, and the group recognised a further R2.6 billion impairment against Sudanese non-current assets in 2025, on top of the R11.7 billion written down in 2024. 

The MENA segment's EBITDA recovered to R760 million from a negative position, but only because the prior year bore the brunt of the impairment cycle. Sudan is now a residual position with an uncertain timeline for recovery.

Bayobab, the wholesale and subsea cable infrastructure arm, remains a structurally interesting asset that does not yet generate the returns its investment intensity warrants. Capital work-in-progress on subsea cable infrastructure remains elevated, and Bayobab's revenue fell to R9.4 billion from R11.1 billion. 

The reversal reflects the completion or unwinding of certain one-off transactions, but the longer-term value proposition of Bayobab as a carrier-grade backbone supplier to the rest of Africa's internet infrastructure is credible, it simply requires patience and the kind of patient capital that long-cycle infrastructure demands.

Group capital expenditure fell to R51 billion from R53.6 billion, a moderate reduction that reflects the post-Nigeria 5G ramp normalisation and the completion of several major infrastructure programmes.

 Net foreign exchange gains of R313 million compared with losses of R18.9 billion in the prior year, one of the starkest contrasts in the entire income statement and perhaps the single number that most cleanly captures how much currency volatility cost the group in 2024 and how much its stabilisation returned in 2025.

 The board declared a final dividend of 500 cents per share, resuming distributions after skipping the interim payment, with the payout calibrated against a recovering earnings base rather than a fully normalised one.