MTN Rwanda experienced double-digit growth in its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) internet offerings, during the financial year ended December 2023.

The telco reported its audited results for the financial year ending December 31, 2023 last week, revealing that FTTH subscribers increased by 45.9% to 9,300 (up from 6,300 in December 2022), resulting in a 26.3% increase in home broadband income.

MTN said that total residential broadband users reached 23,000, including fixed wireless access subscribers.

This, it said underpinned its mobile money subsidiary’s strong revenue growth of 30.2% year-on-year (YoY).

Mapula Bodibe, CEO, MTN Rwanda, said: “The volume and value of MoMo transactions grew by 32.0% to 1.9 billion RWF and 45.4% to RWF 21 trillion, respectively. Customer value management initiatives as well as an increase in the overall subscriber penetration to 68%, contributed to the deepening of the fintech ecosystem in the market. Contributed to the deepening of the fintech ecosystem in the market.”

Another highlight for the year, according to Bodibe, was the bulging of data revenue, which delivered a strong growth of 21.4%, YoY despite more aggressive pricing competition, especially in the fourth quarter (Q4).

She explained: “The strong data revenue performance was driven by a 14.3% increase in active data subscribers and a 20.8% increase in data traffic, underpinned by the launch of our own 4G network which saw a 506% rise in 4G users.”

Last July, MTN and Airtel achieved a significant milestone by launching 4G LTE networks in the East African nation.

The debut came after Rwanda's government altered its earlier plan to rely on a single wholesale network for 4G, 5G, and future communications technologies.

Financially, service revenue climbed by 11.2% to RWF 246.5 billion, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) increased by 6.8% to RWF 115.8 billion, and the EBITDA margin fell by 1.9 percentage points (pp) to 46.4%.

However, profit after tax decreased by 28.9% to RWF 11.4 billion, impacted by higher finance costs adjustments on tower leases and local currency depreciation affecting foreign obligations, said Bodibe.

MTN’s capital expenditure increased by 20.8% to RWF 83.2 billion (up 32.0% to RWF 62.2 billion.

Looking ahead, Bodibe said: “The macroeconomic environment in Rwanda is expected to remain challenging, although we are encouraged by the improvement in the inflation rate.

“MTN Rwanda will continue to invest in the expansion and modernisation of our network and the rollout of competitive services and subscriber growth to accelerate service revenue growth.”