MTN Targets 8.3 Million New Users

• MTN Targets 8.3 Million New Users

South Africa’s MTN expects to add 8.3 million new users in the 2017 financial year, a document handed out at the firm’s results presentation showed on Thursday.

MTN reported that its subscribers increased by 3.3 per cent or 7.7 million to 240 million in the year to ended December.

MTN group swung to its first annual loss in two decades, hit by a regulatory fine in Nigeria and unfavourable currency moves but its shares soared after it kept a dividend.

The company had agreed to pay a fine of $1.1bn to Nigerian government which was reduced from $5.2bn in June 2016 over missing a deadline to cut off unregistered SIM cards.

The fine on MTN wiped $768m per share from the firms in 2016 headline earnings, South Africa’s main measure of profit.

However, MTN shares rose nearly 10 percent after Africa’s largest mobile network operator said it would pay a total dividend of 700 cents a share in spite of the loss, compared with 1,310 in 2015.

MTN also said it expected to keep it at 700 cents in 2017.

“They indicated that they will sustain a dividend of 700 cents, which investors see as a positive,” Avior Capital Markets trader Mark Hodgson said.

MTN said its headline loss came in at $108 or 77 cents per share last year, with headline earnings of 13.6 billion rand, or 746 cents per share in 2015.

MTN woes in Africa’s most populous nation and biggest economy still persists with the company facing an investigation by Nigerian lawmakers for allegedly illegally repatriating $14bn between 2006 and 2016.