Airtel Africa Plc has posted an improved profit after tax of $415 million for the year ended 31st of March 2021, compared to the sum of $408 million posted in comparable period last year.
Inferences to the firm’s recently published financial statement made available on the website of the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX Plc) suggests that these growths might have been drive by an appreciation in mobile money, data and voice revenues during the period under review.
On a general note, analysts believe that the results depict continued strong revenue growth, increased profitability and cash flow, and continued deleveraging. Key extracts from the results are;
- Revenue for the period surged by 14.2%, from $3.42 billion to $3.91 billion. The breakdown of the revenue components showed that voice revenue grew by +11% YoY, data revenue surged by 31.2% YoY, while mobile money revenue advanced by 35.5% YoY. The growths in the revenue figure are partly attributable to an increase in the customer base of the telecommunications giants during the aforementioned period.
- Expenses during the period grew by 9.5% to $2.1 billion
- Operating profit surged to $1.12 billion, indicating an increase of 24.2% YoY.
- Profit after tax grew by a marginal 1.8% to $415 million.
- Earnings per share of 9 cents Vs 10.3 cents YoY.
- Total customer base grew by 6.9% to 118.2 million as at the period under review.
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Commenting on the results the incumbent CEO of Airtel Africa Plc, Raghunath Mandava said: ‘’In these challenging times, I want to say a huge thank you to all our employees, our business partners, and governments and regulators who have supported us, and in turn facilitated our continued support to the economies and communities we serve. Our performance has been strong, with reported growth of 13.6% in underlying revenue and 18.3% in underlying EBITDA, and constant currency growth of 19.4% and 25.2% respectively. Contributions to this growth came across all regions, with particular improvement in Francophone Africa, and across all our major services, with mobile money, data and voice each posting double-digit revenue growth. ‘’ Our customer base also grew strongly for most of the year with new customer registration requirements in Nigeria stemming our onboarding of new customers in the final quarter, and these restrictions were lifted in second half of April. In line with our strategy of unlocking value in our mobile money business, we will soon welcome two new minority investors (The Rise Fund and Mastercard) in agreed transactions which value this part of our business at $2.65bn, as well as bringing $300m into the Group. We have also agreed to sell more of our tower portfolio, yielding yet more cash for the business. The Covid pandemic had eased during the course of the year, however, more recently we have seen a surge in cases. So far this has had no adverse impact on the business, though we will continue to monitor the situation closely. In these times, our purpose of transforming lives has never been more critical. It has always meant more than simply providing mobile and financial services; it is about our drive to create a sustainable future. To that end, this year the leadership team has worked to create our sustainability framework, outlining the role we can play and the focus areas where we can make the biggest difference for each of our business, our people, our community, and our environment. We will report back with our goals later this year and deliver our first sustainability report in 2022. The combination of bringing connectivity to underpenetrated mobile markets and improving financial inclusion through banking the unbanked, across our territories of operation, together provide us with a sizeable runway of sustainable profitable growth potential, and one we remain very confident of delivering.”
