Sunil Taldar, Airtel Africa CEO.

Airtel Africa says that the building of about 3,000 sites and the deployment of over 5,600 kilometers of fiber has increased data capacity across its network by 33%, consequently boosting user experience.

Airtel Africa, which operates in 14 African countries, especially in East Africa, Central and West Africa, revealed this last week when it presented its results for the quarter ending June 30, 2024.

The telco said customer experience remains essential to its strategy, with continued network investment driving increased capacity and coverage.

During the period, the telco's entire subscriber base increased by 8.6% to 155.4 million.

According to Airtel, data subscriber penetration continues to expand, with a 13.4% increase to 64.4 million.

“Data usage per customer increased by 25.1% to 6.2 GBs, with smartphone penetration increasing 4.7% to reach 41.7%,” said the company.

As competition for financial services heats up in the African telecom market, Airtel reported a 14.9% gain in mobile money subscriber growth, stating that it will continue to promote greater financial inclusion across its operating countries.

The telco noted the transaction value climbed by 28.7% in constant currency, with an annualised transaction value of $120 billion in reported currency.

During the period, Airtel reported data Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) growth of 9.6% and mobile money ARPU growth of 8.8% in constant currency, which helped to sustain overall ARPU growth of 9.3% year on year.

Airtel also announced a 'comprehensive cost efficiency campaign' to find specific cost-cutting strategies across the Group.

It said: “Steps taken include the optimisation of network utilisation and design, introducing energy saving initiatives to reduce network costs and the renegotiation of key contracts, whilst ensuring future growth ambitions remain protected. We anticipate the full benefit of this programme to accrue over the year ahead.”

Sunil Taldar, Airtel Africa CEO, commented: “Having visited most of our OpCos (operating companies) since I joined Airtel Africa, I am encouraged by the scale of the opportunity available across our markets in both the GSM and mobile money business. A key priority for us is to look for new opportunities to further grow our business especially in the enterprise, fibre and data centre businesses across our footprint in Africa.

“We will build on the strong foundation established over many years to deliver on these new business opportunities. Most importantly, our emphasis is on significantly improving customer experience by simplifying customer journeys and providing best in class network experience to our customers, whilst remaining focused on driving efficiencies across the business.”

In addition, he said: “A strong capital structure is critical to enabling these ambitions and future proofing our ambitious growth targets. During the quarter, we fully repaid the outstanding debt due at the HoldCo (holding company) and we remain committed to further reduce foreign currency exposure across the Group to limit the impact of currency devaluation on our business. The growth opportunity across our markets remains compelling and we continue to focus on margin improvement as indicated in our FY'24 results."