How MTN plans to reach over ₦6 trillion in revenue by 2026

This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday.

After a bruising 2024 defined by foreign exchange losses and negative earnings, 2025 marked a full reset for MTN Nigeria, with revenue of ₦5.2 trillion ($3.77 billion) and profit of ₦1.1 trillion ($796.77 million) 

This rebound was driven by a mix of tariff increases, stabilising macroeconomic conditions, and rising data demand.

For 2026, the telecom operator wants more.

In its results presentation for 2025, MTN Nigeria said its medium-term service revenue guidance is at least low-20% annual growth between 2026 and 2028. Taking into account what it earned in 2025, this means MTN is on a path to ₦6.24 trillion ($4.52 billion), with ₦7 trillion ($5.07 billion) well within reach in 2026. 

In 2025, it projected a single-year guidance of low 50%, and delivered growth of 55.1%.  

While MTN’s 2025 growth was driven by prices, its 2026 projections will depend on how it converts increased data usage, home broadband, and its fintech play into higher revenue per user, while aggressively controlling costs and FX exposure.

Data is now the business

MTN is no longer a voice company with data on the side. It is now a data company trying to scale everything else around it.

Since 2020, data revenue has grown by over 736.91%, far outpacing voice, which has grown by 106.49%. MTN earned ₦2.78 trillion ($2.01 billion) from data in 2025, and ₦1.85 trillion ($1.34 billion) from voice. 

Since data revenues overtook voice as MTN’s major revenue driver in 2024, it has grown by a combined average of 61% annually, compared to 28% for voice.

If this growth trend holds, and MTN’s data revenue grows by only 40%, data alone is projected to generate ₦3.89 trillion ($2.82 billion) in 2026.  If voice revenues grew by a conservative 20%, MTN would earn ₦2.22 trillion ($1.61 billion) from it.

This shift is not happening in isolation, as Nigerians are using the Internet more.

National data consumption rose by 35.7% in 2025 to 13.25 million terabytes. It is up 82.21% since 2023. Streaming, football, YouTube, Instagram, and religious activities are now dependent on the Internet.

MTN’s average usage per subscriber is now 13.1GB, up from 8.6GB in 2023.

This increase in usage is driving an increased investment in fixed wireless access (FWA) and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH).

Fixed wireless allows telecom operators to deliver broadband to homes using existing mobile network infrastructure. Fibre networks, by contrast, offer higher speeds but require significant upfront investment.

“A lot of the investment over the last three decades has been about mobility,” Ralph Mupita, MTN Group chief executive officer, said on the group’s investor call on March 16. “But over time, we think homes will account for a predominant share of digital workloads.”

As more work and activities move online, MTN is betting that its subscribers will need faster Internet at home.  

“We see fibre as a critical long-term growth platform for the business over the next five to ten years and beyond,” said Ayham Moussa, MTN Nigeria’s chief operating officer, on the subsidiary’s investors’ call on February 27.  

In 2025, MTN Nigeria grew its home broadband subscriber base to 4.2 million, adding one million new users.

This ties into MTN Group’s ambition to connect between 20 million and 30 million homes across Africa over the next five years.

Betting big on fintech

MTN wants fintech to be a critical growth engine.

In 2025, MTN’s core fintech revenue was ₦10.9 billion ($7.89 million), 0.21% of total revenue, and a 186.84% jump from 2024. Cash deposits are also up 196.07% to ₦3.84 billion ($2.78 million), and active wallets grew to 3.7 million, a 32.14% increase. 

The growth was driven by deepened rural penetration, stabilised app experience, intensified agent and merchant activations, and strengthened digital customer value management, Karl Toriola, MTN Nigeria CEO, told investors on February 27, 2026. 

However, this pales in comparison to the 30 to  40 million active wallet ambition MTN has for its fintech arm.

Mobile money is one of Nigeria’s fastest-growing financial services segments. In Q1 2025, transactions reached ₦20.71 trillion ($15 billion), according to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), Nigeria’s central switch and settlement backbone.

This sector is dominated by fintech giants OPay, which reported 10 million daily active users and 100 million daily transactions in 2024, and PalmPay, which processes 15 million daily.

Despite their larger subscriber bases, telco-backed payment service banks, the Central Bank of Nigeria’s mobile money solution for telcos, MTN’s MoMo, Airtel’s SmartCash, 9mobile’s 9PSB, Globacom’s Money Master, and Hope PSB from Unified Payments have yet to scale.

To close the gap, telco-led mobile money arms like Airtel Nigeria’s SmartCash are betting on incentives and physical distribution to force relevance.

For MTN, it is leaning heavily into distribution: more agents, more merchants, deeper rural penetration. Its agent numbers are up nearly 50%.

This aligns with how OPay and PalmPay captured the market when they began. Mobile money agents serve as retail outlets and trust bridges. In areas with low smartphone penetration, these agents process deposits, withdrawals, airtime purchases, bill payments, and help with transfers.

“On rural penetration, our approach is closely aligned with the CBN’s financial inclusion agenda,” Omolara Michael-Nwadu, chief financial officer, MoMo PSB, told investors on February 27. “We identified several underserved, low-income communities with limited access to formal financial services.”

It is scaling its digital payments through an expanded interoperable ecosystem, plugging into banks, fintechs, and other wallets, and increasing transaction capacity to support broader adoption of digital financial services.

Airtel’s SmartCash also recently integrated with multiple banks and financial institutions, enabling wallet transfers and inter-bank transactions across its network, as telco-led fintechs make a play for transfers. 

Despite this, airtime is still MoMo’s most sticky product, the one that users return to most often, Michael-Nwadu noted.

“Historically, customers relied on physical or paper-based airtime purchases,” she said. “Today, they are able to access airtime digitally, which has significantly improved convenience and adoption.”

Fund transfers are seeing strong uptake, with customers increasingly retaining funds in their wallets to make subsequent transfers or purchases.

Core fintech revenue includes the cost of facilitating transfers, which are priced low, and interest earned on customer deposits.

To unlock real value, MoMo is eyeing a lending license, with Michael-Nwadu confirming to investors that discussions are ongoing with the Central Bank of Nigeria.

GSMA, the global industry body for telcos, has argued that regulatory restrictions, especially regarding lending, have limited the broader uptake of telco-led fintech in Nigeria.

While MTN is not looking towards acquisition to boost MoMo’s standing, it is not ruling it out.

“Consolidation is always a possibility, particularly in the Fintech space where there are multiple players,” Toriola told investors on the February 27 call. “We remain open to opportunities—whether partnerships or, in the worst case, acquisitions—but there is nothing active or imminent today.”

Mergers and acquisitions are increasingly emerging as growth strategies for larger startups and exit pathways for smaller ones. In January, Flutterwave acquired open banking startup Mono in an all-stock transaction, valued between $25 million and $40 million, to scale its bank-linked payment system capabilities. 

Paystack Inc., the Stripe-owned Nigerian fintech, entered Nigeria’s banking sector with the acquisition of Ladder Microfinance Bank in January 2026. 

Tariff reset to fade in Q2

MTN’s 2025 performance was heavily boosted by the 50% tariff increase approved by the Nigerian Communications Commission after years of lobbying.

But that effect has a shelf life.

By the second quarter of 2026, the telco expects the impact of the price adjustment on revenue to wane.

“From that point onwards, the base effect of the headline 50% tariff increase will no longer be present in year-on-year comparisons,” Toriola said. “This is an important consideration when thinking about growth dynamics going forward.”

The telco is maintaining a medium-term horizon revenue growth of at least 20%. The guidance is dependent on inflation remaining below 20% and the exchange rate remaining in the ₦1,400/$ and ₦1,700/$ range.

Inflation stood at 15.06% in February, but rising instability in the Middle East caused by the war in Iran may cause a temporary rise in inflation, especially with energy prices spiking, in the coming months. 

The cloud bet

Beyond data and fintech, MTN is also betting on cloud.

It invested $20 million into local cloud services, backed by a $100 million data centre in Lagos, targeting a market dominated by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

The logic is simple: if data is growing, someone has to store and process it.

“We will scale and monetise our data centre capabilities,” Toriola told investors on February 27. “We are now offering cloud computing, applied computing, and storage solutions through our data centre platform.”

The value question

The numbers suggest MTN will make at least ₦6.24 trillion ($4.52 billion) in 2026. 

Tariffs gave it a reset in 2025. In 2026, data will keep giving it scale, and fintech could add depth.

But as more Nigerians spend more time and more money online, the gap between usage and experience is becoming harder to ignore.

In 2025, MTN had 1002 major outages. T2 Mobile (formerly 9mobile) had 632. Airtel had 248, and Glo had 124. These outages often mean a full shutdown of critical services, including SMS, voice calls, mobile data, and USSD.  

At the same time, performance is lagging. Nigeria ranked 85th globally for mobile internet speeds and 129th for fixed broadband speeds in December 2025, according to Speedtest Intelligence by Ookla Research, a global data insight company.

Telecom operators spent over $1 billion to fix this in 2025. On its own, MTN spent over ₦1 trillion ($724.33 million) 

If these investments do not translate into better network quality for subscribers soon, then the real question will shift from how much MTN can make from its 94 million subscribers to whether those subscribers feel like they are getting their money’s worth.

Note: exchange rate used: ₦1,380.58/$