MTN Group Limited (MTN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure in welcoming you to our 30th Annual General Meeting of the Shareholders of MTN Group Limited. Thank you for taking time to be here today. It is always a great pleasure to have our shareholders attending our AGM. Our AGM will be held entirely in electronic format as permitted by Section 63.2A (sic) [ 63(2)(b) ] of the Companies Act of 2008. Following the success of our previous virtual AGMs, we have worked extensively to ensure that we follow a similar rigorous procedure for this AGM. We're certain that electronic participation will continue to provide us an opportunity to engage constructively, allowing participants to interact with us from anywhere in the world, making it easy -- making it both easy, efficient and effective. I'm pleased to introduce the members of the Board who are present here today: Ms. Noluthando Gosa, Ms. Nicky Newton-King, Ms. Sindi Mabaso, Mr. Stan Miller, Ms. Nosipho Molope, Mr. Khotso Mokhele and Ms. Tsholo Molefe, Mr. Ralph Mupita, Ms. Tim Pennington, Mr. Vincent Rague, Mr. Lamido Sanusi, Mr. Nkululeko Sowazi, Mr. Sandile Gwala and the Group Secretary -- Company Secretary, Thobeka Sishuba-Bonoyi. I also extend a warm welcome to our group executives, transfer secretaries, external legal advisers, our sponsors, the external auditors who have joined us today. Shareholders can refer to Pages 11 to 12 of the notice of the AGM, which contains a picture and biography of all the directors who are up for election and reelection. Today is an opportunity to interact with the Board about the overall management and performance of the company. Where possible, we ask that this be within the limited time we have. Shareholders' questions and comments pertaining to the proceedings of the meeting today will be addressed during the question-and-answer session later in the meeting. We will now play a video to guide shareholders on how the voting platform works. The tutorial was sent with link to all shareholders registered to attend and those with proxies. [Presentation]

Now that the video has been played, the voting process is opened to the effect that shareholders can vote and will be able to amend their vote during the meeting. Following the conclusion of the Q&A, voting will be closed and the results of the votes will be shared thereafter. If you are registered to vote but have not received your voting link via e-mail or SMS, please inform the moderator via the question-and-answer mechanism. We shall now proceed with the ordinary business of the meeting. Having regard to the quorum, I advise that 14 members are present at this meeting, either personally or by proxy, representing 6,734,524 ordinary shares, being 0.36% of ordinary shares in the company. I also advise that I'm holding proxies and letters of representation in respect of 1,534,911,680 ordinary shares, being 81.82% of shares of the company. As the necessary quorum is present, I declare this meeting duly constituted. The notice convening this meeting as set out in the notice of the AGM booklet has been sent to all registered shareholders as at the record date of 17th April 2025, and I shall take the notice as read. Before we transact with the ordinary business of the meeting, I confirm that the company has ensured that all the provisions of the Companies Act, JSE listings requirements, memorandum of incorporation as well as company policies in relation to this meeting and the resolution being passed at this meeting has been adhered to. You would have received shareholder users guide on Page 15 of the notice that explains how a voting platform works. Shareholders would have lodged into the platform with your prearranged user name and passwords. This will enable you to submit your votes electronically during the meeting. For those shareholders that have previously submitted proxies, these proxies will be implemented and no further action is required. At this point, I may appoint a representative of transfer secretaries from Computershare, represented by [ Darren Attwell ] to scrutinize the voting process. And I request that a representative of the external auditors of the company, Ernst & Young Inc. to certify the results. May I confirm that the representative is in the meeting.

Darren and Vikas?

[indiscernible]. Yes, I can confirm.

Thank you, Vikas. We will now proceed to the business of the meeting and voting. You will see all the resolutions that are being tabled at this AGM on the screen now. [Voting]

We have 22 ordinary resolutions. 5 special resolutions to be considered at this AGM. Special resolution number 1 has been individually separated and split into 42 individual resolutions. The voting will stay open until I declare the voting is closed at the end of the proceedings. We will continue with the rest of the business of this meeting. I now call upon the Group President and CEO, Ralph Mupita, to give an update on the performance of the business.

Yes. Thank you, Chair, and very good afternoon to all our stakeholders and shareholders who have joined us for this AGM. We trust that you are having a good day. I wanted to talk about the performance of the business in relation to how we have communicated to our shareholders the performance for the first quarter of the year. And if I go to the next slide, we had 6 key messages for investors and broader stakeholders about our quarter 1 results. The first one was that we were encouraged by the acceleration in operational momentum that we saw in our business, in particular, both the Connectivity business and the Fintech business. Specific to the connectivity business, we saw good growth on active data subscribers. People are using more data. That was up over 9%. And we've got our active data subscribers up to 162 million out of a total subscriber base of 297 million. And in the Fintech business, we continue to see good performance and trajectory in the ecosystem expansion. The second message we had is that the financial results we saw in the quarter were underpinned by strong performance, particularly in Nigeria and Ghana. Nigeria had benefited towards the end of the quarter with the tariff increases, but it had a couple of weeks of the tariff increase come through in the March month, and that added to the good growth that we saw. And we also saw Ghana continue to perform very, very strongly within its market. The third message was really that the Fintech sustained a robust performance, the service revenue growth as well as the EBITDA expansion pretty much in line with the medium-term guidance, and we covered that. And I guess, very pleasingly was the expansion in the group EBITDA margin as we recovered from the effects of the prior year in terms of the sharp devaluation in the naira. We've seen a relatively stable naira in the first quarter. And given also the tower leases that we renegotiated, have seen a good EBITDA margin expansion. The fifth area is really around the progress we're making around network sharing and LEO partnerships. In particular, on the network sharing side to the medium to longer term, the initiatives, which I'll cover a little bit later, will be supportive in terms of driving greater efficiency and improving our returns. And the final message we had was really around that the balance sheet remains strong, and we've got a good liquidity profile, and we feel pretty confident that we have the resources and to withstand any resilience in a very challenging geopolitical and macroeconomic conditions. Moving to the next slide, just some of the financial highlights. Our service revenue for the quarter, up 19.8%. That's well within our medium-term guidance, really driven by the growth in data and fintech data growing at just under 29%. We had data traffic growing at 30% in the period. So a good monetization from revenue to traffic across the platform. And as I said, we've seen this pleasing margin expansion, particularly with the recovery that we're seeing in Nigeria. In terms of the balance sheet, holdco leverage, just at 1.5x. That's at the top end of our guidance range. Seasonally, we do see the holdco leverage under pressure in the first quarter. So we're pleased with that. And we had better cash upstreaming in the quarter relative to the same period in prior year. Just moving on to some of the strategic initiatives and priorities that we have when we look at the next slide. Three big areas we reported. I spoke earlier about the network sharing. We announced we're entering into network sharing agreements in a couple of our markets, Nigeria and Uganda with Airtel. And we started looking at similar areas with Vodacom in South Africa, again, focused on driving network efficiencies to improve our return profile. On LEO partnerships, we spoke about them, the fact that we're embracing these new technologies. We have done quite a lot of trials and proof-of-concepts with a variety of partners that you see in the slide there. And this is a space that I think you'll see developments over time. And we see this as just an important form of connectivity for our customers beyond wireless and fixed. Then we discussed the fintech structural separations, which are quite important as we execute our strategy. Focus for the quarter and much of this year is really around Ghana, Uganda and Nigeria. Ghana and Uganda -- the Ghana, we've already had the first EGM on that post the quarter and continue working in Uganda and Nigeria and getting these processes all underway. In terms of the priorities that we have for 2025, if I move to the next slide, a couple of key call-out areas. The first is focusing on sustaining the operational momentum that we saw in the fourth quarter. In that regard, a couple of areas. South Africa, we've got a focus on prepaid, which we spoke to investors about and the initiatives that we're taking. We're pretty pleased with the work that we're seeing in Nigeria in the way that we've implemented tariffs. The objectives that we have is to come out of the negative equity before the year-end, such that the business is able to generate or have sufficient distributable reserves for dividend payments towards the end of the first half of next year. In terms of the markets cluster, Ghana and Uganda continue to show very pleasing performance. Rwanda, we've seen good recovery after the MTR had been withdrawn in the prior year. Those 3 markets, in particular, are encouraging us from a momentum point of view. I spoke about fintech a little bit earlier, focus on growing the ecosystem, leveraging the Mastercard partnerships and expanding the advanced services, particularly payments and bank tech and the focus on MoMo PSB. In terms of capital efficiency and expenses, we continue to focus on our expense initiative program, EEP 2.0, where we're looking to have savings of ZAR 7 billion to ZAR 8 billion over the next 2 years and seeing good progress there. We did reiterate that the capital that we will deploy for the year in rand terms across the business will be in the range of ZAR 30 billion to ZAR 35 billion as we look to progressively improve the return profile of the company. The final area for the year is really kind of to sustain the cash upstreaming good, decent upstreaming in the first quarter, and we need to sustain that to ensure that the leverage and the balance sheet remain healthy. So Nigeria, as I mentioned earlier, real focus is getting out of the negative equity position and building distributable reserves. And I think we've been encouraged by the performance that we've seen since we've implemented the tariff increases. Finally, I just wanted to talk about our medium-term guidance. We have reiterated our medium-term guidance. For Nigeria, specifically, we have called out a single year guidance given that we've seen now the tariff increases come through. So we've reinitiated guidance. So we are seeing service revenue of at least mid-40s and also at least mid-40s for EBITDA margin, underpinned by these tariff adjustments. So -- and we did point out that we anticipate that the Board will be declaring a dividend of ZAR 3.70 per share for FY 2025 payable at the end of the first quarter next year. Chair, I'll hand over back to you.

Thank you very much for your presentation, Ralph. We'll now proceed to the presentation of the audited annual financial statements, the directors' report, Audit Committee report, Social, Ethics and Sustainability Committee report. The consolidated audited annual financial statements of the company and its subsidiaries as approved by the Board of Directors of the company, including the directors' report, the Audit Committee report and external auditor's report for the year ended 31st December 2024 have been distributed as required and are being presented to shareholders. Copies of the abbreviated version of the annual financial statements have also been distributed by registered post and by electronic means to shareholders present at this meeting. The social, ethics and sustainability report which details the activities of the committee for the year ended 31st December 2024 is available on the company's website as well as the suite of reports. Are there questions regarding the business presentation and the annual financial statements and reports being presented?

Yes, Chair. There are 2 questions, Chair. There are 2 questions, Chair on the platform. However, the questions at the moment are not in relation to the business presentation. There's a question from [indiscernible]. And his question is gender equity issues. MTN has achieved a 40% female representation on the Board and 43% in broader workforce. However, leadership and pay equity gaps are concerning with a gender pay gap of over 27%. How is the group accelerating gender parity at senior leadership and executive levels? And what are the specific interventions in place to close the pay gap across the core markets? That's a question from [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] is from ESG Insights SA. Is there a second question? The second question is also from [indiscernible]. His question is around ethical AI governance and emerging technology risks. His question is, MTN has acknowledged the dual risks and opportunities of AI, including misinformation, surveillance and data privacy. How is MTN [ Cisco ] overseeing the ethical deployment of AI tools, especially those that may affect a vulnerable population such as children, elderly and digitally unskilled users?

Thank you very much. I'll ask the Head of -- the Chair of Remco to respond to the gender parity question. And then I'll ask the CEO to respond to the AI question, AI ethical question.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm pleased to state that we have very well developed, and we're executing with energy and passion and commitment to close the gender parity gap. We have specific initiatives that include purposeful recruitment of females into certain key senior positions in the company. And we are committed to closing the gender parity gap through various initiatives that we [Technical Difficulty].

Thank you very much, Khotso. [Technical Difficulty].

Yes, Chair [Technical Difficulty]. We're very focused on the gender mix within the firm and at the Board level also looking at [Technical Difficulty]. I mean, as you know, that our ESG index, we focus on the S, the big diversity measure is increasing women representation across the board. And so to the lead independence feedback, we have several programs that we're running to build kind of internal talent. We have rising leaders program. We have women in tech and a host of initiatives that we are kind of positively skewing even our selection process when we recruit towards more women so that we do move towards the 50%, which is our target. And on the gender pay parity, as was said by the lead independent, we are working on this on a very programmatic basis. And I think year-on-year, we're seeing improvements. But as always, the job is not done. There's still more to be done. Chair, shall I take the AI question?

Yes. AI question.

Yes. I mean we've done a very comprehensive set of work around AI as a very nascent but very important foundational technology. We've been very deliberate in thinking about kind of what use cases do we deploy. We basically said AI will drive kind of 3 areas. One is driving revenues, CVM activity and other forms. The other is driving efficiencies. And the third is changing the way we work as a firm. But obviously, given how these large language modules are developed, there is a potential for bias and other undesirable outcomes. And as part of our use case development, what we've done is to say, when we are taking a new use case, we do look at the ethical considerations of that use case. And before we deploy it, we'll take it through Cisco for their feedback in terms of the ethical considerations for the relevant use case. Thank you, Chair.

There's another question?

Yes. Thank you, Chair. There's a question from [indiscernible] again, and this one is about cybersecurity. And he's saying that MTN in April disclosed a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to personal information of some customers in certain markets. This breach raises concerns about data protection and privacy and seems to be affecting a lot of companies. What specific measures has MTN implemented to strengthen its cybersecurity framework and prevent future breaches, ensuring the protection of consumer data across all markets?

Chair, I can pick that one up. We take cybersecurity very seriously across MTN. And we treat cybersecurity or information security as a set of parameters where it's hardwired to the group. So we don't really have a federal approach towards managing cybersecurity. We have a few other areas that are centrally driven given that our information architecture is on a mtn.com basis. So we have to harden the perimeters across that mtn.com domain. Specifically to your questions, I mean, we have probably the most advanced techniques on threat detection and threat eviction. Sometimes you see threats coming in and detection. You will well remember that we did communicate a DDoS attack about 2 or 3 years ago by a company called -- or a group called Sudan Anonymous. So we have the processes for these detections. Specific to this one, we did communicate that we had seen approximately just over 3,700 customers affected, specifically in Ghana or majority of them in Ghana. But our systems overall had not been impacted. It had been a system that is remote to our core systems, and there was no loss in any mobile money accounts. And it was unstructured data sets that have been -- and we did report to the information regulators in the various markets.

Thank you. Due to time constraints, we might not be able to go through all the questions. However, we will respond to questions after the meeting and publish our responses on our website should this be necessary. Thank you very much for your participation. Before I close the questions-and-answer session, if any shareholders require specifically that we respond to any question now, please indicate this by raising your hand. There's an additional question. I would like to remind shareholders who have not completed the vote yet to please cast your vote now. Andre, are there any shareholders who should still exercise their vote?

Chair, voting has gone second. You can close the vote Chair.

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the voting proceedings, and I now declare the voting closed. May I allow the scrutineer to finalize the counting of the votes for a short period before we proceed to display the results for each resolution, which has been tabled at this meeting. I will now request the group Company Secretary to read for confirmation purposes, the results as they are displayed on the screen.

Thank you, Chair, and good afternoon to the shareholders, the directors, management and colleagues. The voting results, Chair, is represented. The ordinary resolution number 1.1 we have 96.76% and I'll read the last line, Chair. The ordinary resolution number 3.5, 99.88%. All resolutions, Chair, displayed have been passed with the requisite majority. Thank you, Andre. The second page of the resolutions, the ordinary resolution number 3.6, votes in favor 99.93%. Special resolution number 1.10, 99.98%. I would like to reflect, Chair, that all the resolutions reflected have been passed with requisite majority. The next one, Chair and the shareholders. Resolution ordinary resolution 3.6, 99.93%. Ordinary resolution number 8, which is the nonbinding resolution has received 59.18%. Thank you, Andre. Special resolution number 1.11, 99.98%. And the last special resolution number 1.36, 99.98%. All of the resolutions reflected have been passed with the requisite majority. Thank you, Andre. Special resolution number 1.27 votes in favor, 99.98%. And the last resolution, special resolution number 1.42 passed with 99.9%. All of the resolutions reflected have been passed with the majority and therefore, they have been passed. Thank you, Andre. As we come to the last page of the voting results, special resolution number 2, resolution number 4, special resolution number 5, they have been passed with in favor, 99.96%. Special resolution number 2, 97.11% special resolution number 3, 95.46% special resolution number 4 and 98.3% special resolution number 5. The resolution reflected have been passed in favor and all the resolutions have been passed, Chair. Thank you. Those are the voting results for the AGM.

Ladies and gentlemen, as all the business on the agenda has been dealt with, I now formally close the proceedings of the 30th Annual General Meeting of MTN Group Limited. As that concludes our discussions, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you once again for your attendance and urge you to continue to attend our AGM. Thank you.