SENS Note - 08 March 2018
MTN final results December 2017
 
Revenue for the year lowered to R132.8 billion (2016: R147.9 billion), EBITDA climbed to R47 billion (2016: R40.8 billion), operating profit jumped to R20.6 billion (2016: R14.1 billion), profit attributable to equity holders of the company turned around to R4.4 billion (2016: loss of R2.6 billion), while headline earnings per share was 182 cents per share (2016: headline loss per share of 77 cents per share).

Final dividend
Notice was given that a gross final dividend of 450 cents per share for the period to 31 December 2017 has been declared.

Company prospects and guidance
MTN Group well positioned to capture growth
Africa and the Middle East are forecast to remain among the world's key growth regions over the medium to long term. We are confident that MTN is well placed to benefit from this opportunity. We will continue to leverage our scale and enhance our competitive position, benefiting from favourable demographic growth, low data penetration in our markets and the unique opportunity we have to provide our customers with a range of digital services.

In the second half of 2017, we established clearly defined initiatives and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of the six areas of BRIGHT. We expect these initiatives to support improved top-line growth, EBITDA margins and cash flow over the medium term.

Over the next few years we expect to deliver upper-single-digit constant currency service revenue growth for the group, driven by mid-single-digit growth from South Africa and double-digit growth from Nigeria. Over the same period we expect to see an expansion in group EBITDA margins.

Our extensive capex investments across our operations in 2017 allowed us to show a credible improvement in our networks across a number of our markets. This will be important in ensuring the business is able to provide a superior customer experience and competitive data networks which will support the growing demand for data and digital services. Over the next few years we expect group capex intensity (which measures our efficiency in deploying assets) to moderate within a range of 20% to 15%.
 
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