MTN Group’s FY2025 earnings swept through Africa’s business media in March 2026 — the $2 billion war chest, the FibreX capex push, the fintech acquisition pipeline. What received almost no comparable attention was the full-year results from its only genuine pan-African rival. Airtel Africa reported revenue of $4.955 billion for the year ended 31 March 2025, swung from a $89 million loss to a $328 million net profit, and grew its mobile money user base by 17.3% to 44.6 million customers. The numbers were largely filed, noted, and forgotten by the time MTN’s March announcement arrived. They deserve a second look.
The two companies are running fundamentally different playbooks across the same continent. Understanding that divergence is increasingly important for anyone trying to make sense of where value is being created — and destroyed — in African telecoms.
The Nigeria Recovery
Nigeria is the single most important market in African telecoms. Both MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria are listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, and both spent much of 2024 absorbing the consequences of the naira’s collapse. Airtel Africa’s full-year Nigeria performance for FY2025 reflected a company working through that currency shock in real time: reported revenue declined meaningfully in dollar terms, but the underlying demand picture was more resilient than the headlines suggested.
The turning point came when Nigeria’s communications regulator approved a tariff increase in early 2025 — the first meaningful upward revision in years. The impact was visible immediately in Airtel’s numbers: Q4 FY2025 revenue grew 23.2% in constant currency terms and 17.8% in reported currency, the strongest quarterly performance of the fiscal year. The tariff reset gave Airtel Nigeria room to recover margins that had been compressed by inflation and a currency that lost roughly half its value against the dollar over 2023-2024.
By the time Airtel reported its H1 FY2026 numbers in October 2025 — covering the six months to 30 September 2025 — Nigeria revenue had reached $697 million, up 49% in constant currency. Margins rose to 56%. The recovery was not slow and gradual; it was sharp and decisive, consistent with a market that had been underpriced for years and was catching up fast.
Beyond Nigeria: East Africa and Francophone
Airtel operates in 14 African markets, and the regional breakdown for FY2025 shows a more balanced picture than many analysts give it credit for. East Africa generated $1.05 billion in revenue, up 15.6% in constant currency, with EBITDA margins at 48%. Francophone Africa — which includes markets such as Niger, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and Gabon — contributed $749 million, up 14.5% in constant currency, albeit with tighter margins at 39.5%.
Across all three regions, the growth driver is consistent: data and mobile money. The company’s total customer base grew 8.7% to 166.1 million, smartphone penetration reached 44.8%, and data customers increased 14.1% to 73.4 million. In aggregate, data revenue grew 30.5% in constant currency during FY2025. These are not rounding-error gains on a mature business — they reflect a company in the middle of a real structural shift in how its customers use mobile services.
The Fintech Gap That Nobody Is Talking About
The most striking contrast between Airtel Africa and MTN does not lie in subscriber numbers or network footprint. It lies in how much money their respective mobile money platforms contribute to total group revenue.
As BETAR’s analysis of MTN’s FY2025 results noted, MoMo contributes less than 4% of MTN Group’s total service revenue despite serving 69.5 million active users across 16 markets. MTN’s fintech division is large by African standards in absolute terms, but it remains a small slice of a company whose identity is still primarily defined by its core voice and data business.
Airtel Money tells a different story. In H1 FY2026, Airtel Money generated $623 million in revenue — representing approximately 21% of total group revenue for that period. Mobile money customers grew 20% to 49.8 million, and the total value of transactions processed on an annualised basis reached $193 billion, up 35.9%. The platform has crossed a threshold that MTN’s MoMo has not: it now contributes a material and growing share of group earnings, not just a strategic footnote.
That gap matters strategically. Airtel Money is already generating fintech-scale revenues without needing to spin out a separate entity or raise external capital to pursue acquisitions. MTN, by contrast, is spending considerable management bandwidth — and potentially acquisition capital — trying to build MoMo into a product that Airtel Money already resembles today. The company is also in active preparation for an Airtel Money IPO — as of March 2026, management is “very close to finalising the preferred listing venue,” with London and the UAE among the options under review. A listing would crystallise fintech value on the balance sheet in a way that MoMo’s current structure has not yet enabled.
Sell Towers, Buy Time: The Asset-Light Playbook
The infrastructure strategies of the two companies represent a philosophical split. MTN is building. Its FibreX broadband initiative — targeting 30 million homes across Africa, with Nigeria as the primary initial market — its data centre investments, and its M&A war chest are all premised on the view that owning infrastructure creates long-term competitive advantage and pricing power. MTN’s FY2025 capex came to R38.5 billion, representing 17% of service revenue and within the company’s own 15–18% target range. That thesis is not wrong — but it requires sustained capital commitment, and the returns will take time to materialise.
Airtel Africa has been moving in the opposite direction. Over the past three years, the company has sold large portions of its tower portfolio to Helios Towers across markets including Madagascar, Malawi, Chad, and Gabon, and previously Tanzania and others. The rationale was explicit: convert passive infrastructure into cash, reduce external debt, and invest the proceeds back into network and sales capacity in the same markets. The result is a company with a lighter balance sheet, lower gross leverage, and more flexibility to direct capital toward higher-return activities.
That asset-light discipline showed up in the FY2026 trajectory. Operating cash flow for H1 FY2026 was $1.388 billion — a 41.8% increase year-on-year. Net debt to EBITDA improved from 2.3x to 2.1x. The company nonetheless raised its capex guidance to $875-$900 million for the full year, directing that spending toward network densification, new site rollout — 2,350 new sites in H1 FY2026 alone — and fibre expansion to 81,000 kilometres. Airtel is not shrinking its network ambitions; it is funding them differently.
The Investor Question
African telecoms investors face a genuine choice between two credible but divergent strategies. MTN offers scale — 300 million subscribers, 19 markets, a $2 billion acquisition war chest, and a platform thesis that Mastercard has endorsed with a $200 million strategic investment. The bull case rests on MoMo eventually becoming a full-service financial platform that justifies a fintech-level valuation multiple.
Airtel Africa offers a different bet: a company that has already done more of the hard work on fintech monetisation, carries a lighter balance sheet, and is generating strong free cash flow from a smaller but profitable footprint. The Airtel Money IPO — with venue selection in its final stages as of this writing — would serve as a direct valuation test of that thesis, potentially unlocking a re-rating of the parent company that the market has not yet priced in.
The Africa telecoms story in 2026 is not one company. It is two, running opposite strategies across many of the same markets. The final verdict on which playbook wins will take years to render. But Airtel Africa’s FY2025 results make clear that the race is considerably closer than the coverage would suggest.
— Business Reporter, BETAR.africa
