[Transcript] #10: MTN - How Africa's largest Telco grew to dominate Africa and expand to other emerging markets
Transcript for podcast originally recorded on August 23, 2020
😉 Hello glorious Afrobility readers!
As I mentioned previously, we will start to release transcripts of all Afrobility episodes to paid Substack members and below is the next one from our MTN episode.
2023-08-20 Thoughts: MTN was one of the first telecommunications companies we analyzed, following Safaricom and Reliance Jio. It remains one of the most significant and influential players in the African tech industry. Several African Telcos are moving beyond their traditional data and airtime business and raising funds to scale their FinTech services. Some examples:
MTN (episode #10): Recently sold a minority stake in their FinTech business to MasterCard, valuing it at an impressive $5.2 billion. This development underscores that MTN's Fintech arm alone stands as one of the largest tech companies in Africa.
Airtel (episode #13): Airtel Africa Mobile Commerce received outside investments
Orange (episode #15): Orange Africa Money gaining momentum. What impact will Wave have on this?
Vodacom (episode #47): Double-dipping since they launched VodaPay and own 35% of Safaricom/M-Pesa.
It's going to be intriguing to observe how these Telcos’ fintech arms compete with startups to expand their range of services for consumers. Exciting times ahead!
Enjoy & DFTBA!
Olumide Ogunsanwo
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Transcript starts here
[00:00:00] Olumide Ogunsanwo: Welcome to Afrobility, a conversation about African business and technology. Today we're going to talk about MTN, the largest telco in Africa. We'll discuss its founding and early history, success in Africa, global expansion, non telco businesses, and then we'll end with our views on its future outlook.
This episode was recorded on August 23rd, 2020. Banky, how are you?
[00:00:39] Bankole Makanju: This week for me was strangely, well, not strangely, this week was intense, but I got through it. Why are we talking about MTN?
[00:01:03] Olumide Ogunsanwo: I think there are three big reasons why MtN is important. MTN is the largest telco in Africa. So this is an Africa Tech podcast. Why not is the eighth largest telco in the world. All the Telcos you know and love, MTN probably has more subscribers than they do. MTN has 262M subscribers. They have more subscribers than Verizon and ATT if you're in America. If you're in the UK, they have more subscribers than BT, than EE, so they're a big deal.
The second reason is that because MTN is South African, there's also a narrative of the Nigerian South African angle and how two of the biggest economies in Africa relate to each other.