Airtel Africa to Push its Focus to East Africa and Francophone Regions

Despite the consistent negative net additions in Nigeria, Airtel Africa has been seeing an acceleration in its customer base in East Africa and Francophone regions.

Airtel Africa stated that the new SIM card registration that has been put into force has been the main reason for the larger slowdown in customer base growth.

“The company’s customer base across its 14 operations rose 2.2% (in the April to June quarter) to 120.8 million and that the monthly churn rate dropped to 3.6%. The company’s unit average revenue per user (ARPU) grew 6.5% sequentially to US$3.1-million in the April to June period. Data revenue in turn, grew nearly 14% to US$355-million while voice revenue rose 3.3% sequentially to US$559-million in the same quarter. The company has posted strong double-digit growth across voice (26.0%), data (37.4%) and mobile money (53.7%), and across all regions.”

Airtel Africa CEO Raghunath Mandava

The company continues to see huge potential across voice, data, and mobile money services due to the low penetration levels in Africa.

“Sub-Sahara Africa is now experiencing a third wave of the pandemic (COVID-19) and governments are implementing balanced measures of lockdowns and restrictions. In these challenging times, our business model has so far proven resilient but we continue to monitor the situation closely for the potential impact on local economies and customers. Our continued focus on modenisation and rollout of our network, along with simplifying our products and improving our distribution, have all helped us to make handsome gains across voice, data and mobile money.”

Raghunath Mandava, Chief Executive Officer, Airtel Africa