There is no interim dividend from MTN this year, and there wasn't one last year either. What shareholders get instead is R6 billion spent buying up its own shares.
A buyback is the other way of handing money back. Instead of paying cash out, the company takes shares off the market, so everyone still holding one owns a slightly bigger slice of the business. The board has approved it, and buying starts once MTN is allowed to trade in its own shares again.
It's worth noting that none of this is improvised. At the end of 2025 MTN set itself a rule: every year, between 40% and 60% of the cash left over once the business has paid for itself goes to shareholders: part as a guaranteed dividend, part as buybacks. For this half, the buyback is doing all of it.
The half that paid for it
MTN makes its money selling airtime, data and mobile money, and in six months all three sold more. Take out the rand's swings and what it earned from services was up 17.5%, to R115.3 billion. Data did most of the lifting: it grew by close to a third, and now brings in about half of everything MTN takes in. Costs grew slower than the money coming in, which is the part that pays for a buyback. It ended the half with 317.7 million customers, more than half of them on data.
But it certainly wasn't spread evenly. Nigeria brought in R35.55 billion, a quarter more than a year ago, and Ghana grew by more than 40%. Home, though, was the drag: South African revenue slipped, to R24.84 billion.
Where the reported numbers went
The profit line tells a different story, and two things outside the day-to-day business explain it. The first is Irancell, MTN's joint venture in Iran, whose value has been written down. That does not mean money left the building, only that MTN now admits the stake is worth less than its books said. Daily Investor puts the writedown at R3.9 billion. The second is South Sudan, where the currency moved against MTN and cost it R2.3 billion.
Between them they pulled profit down 25%, to R7.41 billion, and left earnings per share 5.8% lower at 615 cents. Neither has much to do with how many people bought airtime.
MTN is sticking to the targets it gave investors: keep service revenue growing in the high teens or better, and debt no larger than a year's operating earnings. Growth did slow over the first half, but management expects a stronger second, and it has three fairly specific reasons. Airtime lending in Nigeria is returning to normal, last year's price increases there stop flattering the comparison, and South Africa's prepaid business gets back to growing.
