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- A levy on electronic money transfer services introduced in May hit the contribution to revenue from MTN Ghana's mobile money business.
- Like Nigeria, MTN Ghana is in the process of re-registering its customers and unregistered SIM face being blocked from 1 November.
- Data added the largest contribution to revenue in the mobile operator's nine months to end-September, growing almost 50%, and the company is in the process of expanding its network.
- For more stories, go to the News24 Business front page.
MTN's Mobile Money (MoMo) service in Ghana is taking a hit from the introduction of a levy on electronic transfers which came into effect in May, with revenue from person-to-person (P2P) transactions slipping by double digits in the mobile operator's nine months to end September.
Ghana's government has imposed a 1.5% levy on the value of all electronic transfers, including banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions, payment service providers and electronic money issuers, as a means to earn revenue from digital services. The levy is in addition to other applicable charges.
The operator said revenue from P2P transactions declined by 13.3% year-on-year in the three quarters to end September, with the contribution of MoMo to service revenue falling to 19.1% from 22.8% previously. The firm also took a decision to reduce P2P transaction fees by 25% to cushion the effect on its customers.
Despite the challenges, active MoMo users increased by 16.3% to 12.4 million, the firm said, and overall, MTN Ghana's service revenue grew by 27.9% to 7.1 billion cedi (R9.2 billion).
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Data revenue saw the biggest year-on-year jump at 43.7% to 2.8 billion cedi, with data usage jumping by just over half, and the group growing its data subscribers just over a fifth. Voice revenue increased by 23.4% to 2.4 billion cedi.
Mobile subscribers climbed 13% to 28.5 million, and like in Nigeria, MTN Ghana is facing an order by authorities to conduct SIM registration of all customers. It said it had successfully registered 15.2 million subscribers using the Ghana National ID at the end of September 2022, with approximately 5.6 million yet to complete their registration.
On 17 October, the Ministry of Communication and Digitalisation announced that all services with the exception of USSD services for SIM cards that have not completed registration would be blocked from 1 November 2022. The firm said it was "working with the regulator on their formal directive".
"As a result, MTN will continue to deploy resources and work with the regulator to accelerate re-registration and ensure a speedy completion of the exercise," it said.
MTN Ghana said it spent 1.4 billion cedi (R1.8 billion) during the period to improve the quality of its service and expand its network, and it rolled out 339 2G; 339 3G; 1 081 4G sites; as well as modernised 805 others. This supported the increase in its 4G coverage to 99.3% of the population.
