Airtel Nigeria is one of the big 3 telcos in Nigeria (the other two being MTN Nigeria and Globacom Nigeria).

Last week its parent company Airtel Africa dropped its 9M 2024 results and held an earnings call. Airtel Africa is the listed entity on the Nigerian and London Stock exchanges. 

My initial focus was to write on Airtel Africa, but it would have made the post unduly voluminous. So here is my brief take on Airtel Nigeria numbers from the parent company IR notes.

Remains a key segment 

Airtel Nigeria remains a key segment of Airtel Africa. For the 9 months ended December 2024, it accounted for 23% of total revenue, 24% of EBITDA and 23% of capital expenditure. 

The trillion Naira year 

Revenue and profit dropped (in Dollar terms) due to the devaluation of the Naira. In Naira terms, there was robust growth. FY 2024/2025 is the year, Airtel Nigeria would hit N1 trillion in revenue. 

The first table is performance in dollar terms

The second table is performance in Naira terms 

Operational performance 

Management during the 9M 2024 earnings call gave some insight into the driver of the growth in voice and data usage as well as the impending tariff increase.

What’s driving data consumption?  

“We are seeing very robust data consumption growth per user in Nigeria, which is a combination of 2 or 3 things. One is as customers upgrade from feature phone to smartphone and then from 3G smartphone to a 4G smartphone, that is the kind of increase that we are seeing. The usage normally is almost about — we see a multiple and that also leads to an increase in overall stickiness of the customer and ARPU, therefore….”

What’s driving voice growth? 

If you look at Nigeria, our voice ARPU (average revenue per user) is circa $0.90. And therefore, there is less incentive or reason for customers to switch to OTT (over the air), and that’s the behavior that we have seen. And then there is a large number of 2G customers, which comprise of this voice usage as well. So that, to a large extent, leads to an increase in voice usage consumption per customer. The third also is we are seeing acceleration in this is also the quality of the voice experience.

And as we just keep expanding our coverage and we get more people into our coverage, we’ll continue to see some amount of voice consumption per customer going up.

On tariff increases

There is a little bit of an uncertainty around the competitive action around these tariff increases and the elasticity of demand and the method whereby these tariff increases can be implemented. 

As a result of some of these questions which remain slightly unanswered at this point in time, as it is very early for us to conclude on the real impact that this tariff increase will have on our business.

 We expect to initiate these adjustments in early February once we get — once we hear back from the authorities. And these actions have had time to play out. We will have more visibility on the potential impact and which is when we will be able to provide better context to the market on the impact of price increase on the overall growth and therefore, on the margin improvement.