Airtel Africa said its customer base reflects growth with acceleration in its East Africa and Francophone regions, despite continued negative net additions in Nigeria.

The company said the slowdown in customer base growth was due to regulatory restrictions on new SIM card registration currently enforced by authorities to help combat fraud and cybercrime.

According to the company, it also recorded a strong growth in data and mobile money revenues across its operations.

It said revenue growth for the quarter ended June rose by nearly 31% on-year to reach US$1.11-billion.

Airtel Africa CEO Raghunath Mandava said the company’s customer base across its 14 operations rose 2.2% (in the April to June quarter) to 120.8 million and that the monthly churn rate dropped to 3.6%.

He said the company’s unit average revenue per user (ARPU) grew 6.5% sequentially to US$3.1-million in the April to June period.

Mandava added that data revenue in turn, grew nearly 14% to US$355-million while voice revenue rose 3.3% sequentially to US$559-million in the same quarter.

He said the company has posted strong double-digit growth across voice (26.0%), data (37.4%) and mobile money (53.7%), and across all regions.

Mandava added that the company continues to see huge potential across voice, data and mobile money services due to the low penetration levels in Africa.

“Sub-Sahara Africa is now experiencing a third wave of the pandemic (COVID-19) and governments are implementing balanced measures of lockdowns and restrictions. In these challenging times, our business model has so far proven resilient but we continue to monitor the situation closely for the potential impact on local economies and customers. Our continued focus on modenisation and rollout of our network, along with simplifying our products and improving our distribution, have all helped us to make handsome gains across voice, data and mobile money.”

Airtel Africa’s operations cover DRC, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia.