KAMPALA (Reuters) – MTN Uganda, the country’s largest telecom company, posted a 20% rise in pretax profit for the full year 2022, boosted by financial technology and data services, it said on Monday.
MTN Uganda’s biggest financial technology products are mobile money services that allow clients to transfer and receive cash, pay for products and conduct other commercial transactions.
Majority-owned by South Africa’s MTN Group, the company listed on Uganda’s stock exchange in December 2021, although its initial public offering was undersubscribed. It did not trade early on Monday.
MTN Uganda Chief Executive Officer Sylvia Mulinge, said in commentary accompanying the results that fintech and data service sales led a rise in pretax profit to 591 billion shillings ($160 million) from 491 billion shillings in 2021.
Fintech revenues and data service revenues both increased by roughly a quarter.
“On the fintech growth, we have continued to grow rapidly, reaching new milestones in product rollout and merchant partnerships,” Mulinge said.
MTN Uganda, which has a subscriber base of 17.2 million, chiefly competes with a unit of India’s Bharti Airtel.
It proposed a dividend of 5.5 shillings per share, which would bring the total dividend for 2022 to 15.9 shillings per share. In 2021, its dividend per share was 15 shillings.
($1 = 3,705.0000 Ugandan shillings)
(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; editing by George Obulutsa and Barbara Lewis)
