MTN

After a brutal 2024 marked by a collapsing naira and a ₦400.4 billion full-year loss, MTN Nigeria staged one of the sharpest corporate recoveries in the country's recent history. Full-year 2025 revenue rose 54.9% to ₦5.20 trillion, EBITDA more than doubled to ₦2.74 trillion, and the company swung to a record ₦1.11 trillion profit (earnings per share moved from a loss of ₦19.05 to a positive ₦53.07), resuming dividend payments for the first time since the crisis. A 50% tariff adjustment approved by regulators in January 2025, a new national roaming agreement, and reduced foreign-currency exposure all drove the turnaround, with data revenue surging 74.5% to ₦2.78 trillion, now more than half of service revenue, and MoMo fintech revenue up 79.7% to ₦191.27 billion.

That momentum carried into 2026, with the company posting its best-ever half-year performance (₦1.09 trillion in profit before tax, up 75.4%, on revenue of ₦2.99 trillion) and a subscriber base climbing toward 97 million, comfortably ahead of Airtel as Nigeria's dominant operator with just over half the national market. More than ₦1.6 trillion has been invested in network capacity since the start of 2025, pushing the network past 62,000 base stations and population coverage to 93.7% on 2G, 87.6% on 3G, 84.6% on 4G, and a still-early 12.8% on 5G, with CEO Karl Toriola candid that the strategy is to build capacity ahead of demand.

2026 also marked MTN Nigeria's 25th year of commercial operations, a milestone framed less as a victory lap and more as a marker of how far the country's telecoms infrastructure has come since 2001. The company was recognised as the Nigeria Revenue Service's Most Compliant Taxpayer after contributing ₦878.7 billion in taxes and levies in 2025, entering the rest of the year as both the country's most valuable multinational brand and a business that has decisively put its worst year behind it.