JSE-listed MTN Group is embarking on an evolution of its strategy as it wraps up Ambition 2025, which delivered robust growth and efficiencies, significantly derisked its balance sheet and improved returns.

The company achieved meaningful progress in advancing its Ambition 2025 strategic priorities over the past five years.

This includes increasing total subscribers from 279.6-million in 2020 to 307.2-million in 2025, with active data subscribers rising from 114.3-million to 172.6-million and fintech monthly active users growing from 46.4- million to 69.5-million over the same period.

Ambition 2025 secured cumulative expense efficiency savings of R16.4-billion from a 2020 baseline, increased return on equity from 17% to 25.6% and generated cumulative proceeds of R22.6-billion from its asset realisation programme, besides other milestones, says MTN Group CEO and president Ralph Mupita.

“We are entering a new phase of a rapidly evolving, platform-led, AI-driven and customer-centric world. In this new phase, MTN is uniquely positioned to extend digital and financial services, creating hope, dignity and opportunity for all of the continent.”

MTN will now build on the strategic priorities and focus areas of the previous strategy after determining that the fundamentals remain relevant and appropriate.

This follows a comprehensive review of the Ambition 2025 strategy, which was completed last year and evaluated the evolving geopolitical, macroeconomic, regulatory, competitive and technology landscapes, as well as evolving customer behaviours and needs for digital services across MTN’s footprint.

While remaining vigilant to evolving risks in global geopolitics, Mupita says Ambition 2030 embodies the right framework to sustain MTN’s medium-term growth and value-creation journey.

The Ambition 2030 evolution delivers a simplified and focused three-platform approach comprising connectivity, fintech and digital infrastructure.

“This three-platform approach embodies the core and drive of our evolution to the Ambition 2030 strategy, which will best position the group to capture value from the structural growth opportunities brought about by data adoption and financial inclusion across Africa,” Mupita explains.

The connectivity pillar will focus on three strategic priorities: ‘scale data, accelerate home and empower enterprises’, which seek to drive growth through access to innovative connectivity and digital services.

Fintech will be built on the priorities of growing the ecosystem and accelerating advanced services and democratise services, such as lending, insurance, payments and remittances, to deepen financial inclusion.

Meanwhile, digital infrastructure will position MTN to better provide for Africa’s expected exponential digital workloads growth as consumers and businesses increasingly seek more digitised experiences and AI becomes more prevalent.

The strategic priorities to drive this include advance fibre networks; expand AI-enabled data centres and unlock towers value.

MTN is further focused on executing three cross-platform strategic priorities, including delivering a leading customer experience by driving end-to-end digital experience through apps and shifting customers toward seamless self-service.

MTN’s products will be designed to best-in-class standards, rooted in simplicity and transparency. Further, the company is building future-fit capabilities and skills to support sustained delivery of this priority.

MTN will also leverage AI for growth by transforming its platforms businesses through AI-native capabilities.

“We are embedding predictive, self-managed networks, intelligent financial services and AI-ready cloud and API ecosystems. We are also committed to driving responsible AI use and governance and upskilling our talent.”