Airtel Africa profits jumps to $154.5m

Airtel Africa’s profit after tax for the quarter ended March almost tripled to $154.52 million, from $57.5 million in the last quarter of 2016-17. This is the second positive margin in the telcos’ eight years of operations on the continent.

“Africa revenues grew by 10.7 per cent year-on-year led by strong growth in data and Airtel money transaction value. Mobile data traffic has grown by 88 per cent to 70 billion megabytes in the quarter as compared with 37 billion MBs in the corresponding quarter last year.

“Data customers increased by 48 per cent to 24.9 million from16.9 million in the corresponding quarter last year,” said Airtel Africa chief executive Raghunath Mandava.

The telco was in the news last year amid rumours that it was contemplating exiting the African business altogether.

In 2017, Bharti Airtel’s chairman Sunil Mittal admitted that the telcos operations in Africa had not been as successful as anticipated, which had seen it exit several markets in West Africa, either through sell offs or mergers.

“Our operations in the 15 African countries haven’t been a successful experiment and we now need a change of strategy,” said Mr Mittal.

Source: East African