Bloomberg reports telecoms group considering sale of smaller opcos in West Africa
MTN, in partnership with ayoba, reached the milestone of 20 million monthly active users earlier this month – up from 10 million at the same time last year.
The ayoba super-app was developed in partnership with MTN and is available globally to all networks, but focuses on Africa. The platform is part of MTN’s Ambition 2025 strategy and targets 100 million monthly active users by 2025, and was launched to rival WhatsApp, owned by the company formerly known as Facebook.
Ayoba supports call, chat and share, and offersmore than 150 free content channels, covering sports, fashion, beauty, news, comedy, health, entertainment, education, empowerment and more. Users receive free daily data in participating markets: content is updated daily and available in English, French, Arabic and select local languages including isiZulu, Kinyarwanda and others.
Looking for growth
ayoba says growth was led by its music streaming service with the number of streaming session up 174% in 2022. In early December, year-on-year growth for messaging was 125%, games were up 208%, while micro-app sessions increased 322%, with 85-million stories posted by users to their networks.
Ayoba isn’t the only game in town: Vodacom launched the VodaPay wannabe super-app in late 2021 and reports more than 3.5-million downloads, 2.2 million of which were by registered users.
The key markets in MTN’s footprint, which are also key to ayoba, include Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda and the Republic of Congo.
Separately, Bloomberg reports MTN is considering selling off some of its smaller opcos in West Africa, but not its key markets of Nigeria and Ghana, to focus on core markets with higher growth potential – such as from mobile money and data sales – according to unidentified sources.
It has a presence is West African countries including Benin, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Liberia. MTN has been refocusing on Africa and withdrawing from the Middle East since 2020. Last month it sold its Afghanistan business to Beirut-based M1 New Ventures for $35 million.
2Africa lands in South Africa
Also this week, MTN South Africa and MTN GlobalConnect, in partnership with a consortium, landed a 45,000km subsea cable in South Africa. This is part of its plans to build a subsea network to connect African countries to Europe and the Middle East.
MTN says that Africa’s big economies have a fast-growing population of internet users, with growth fuelled by rapidly expanding mobile broadband networks and affordable smartphones, but the continent still lags behind the rest of the world in internet connectivity.
“Data traffic across African markets is expected to grow between four and five fold over the next five years, so we need infrastructure and capacity to meet that level of growth and demand,” MTN Group Chief Executive Ralph Mupita said in a statement.
The subsea cable project, called 2Africa, will support the western and eastern sides of Africa once complete in 2023 and 2024 respectively.