MTN Nigeria is making more money than ever.

But there is a number in its latest results that tells a more complicated story: average revenue per user is falling.

The telecom operator increased service revenue by 25.9% to ₦2.99 trillion ($2.25 billion) in the first half of 2026, while its subscriber base grew by 8.9% to 92.2 million, according to its H1 2026 financial results.

On the surface, the numbers look exceptionally strong.

More customers.

More revenue.

More data consumption.

But when MTN's performance is viewed on a per-customer basis, the picture becomes less straightforward.

MTN Group's Q2 2026 results show that MTN Nigeria's dollar-denominated average revenue per user (ARPU) fell 8.82% to $3.41. Local-currency ARPU also declined, falling 1.67% to ₦5,101.

That matters because the naira movement alone cannot fully explain the decline.

The bigger question is whether MTN Nigeria is entering the next stage of its growth story: moving from price-led growth to usage-led growth.

MTN is growing, but not every customer is equally valuable

MTN added approximately 7.5 million subscribers during the first half of 2026, taking its customer base to 92.2 million.

That is an enormous customer base.

It is also changing the composition of the company's revenue.

New customers do not necessarily spend as much as established customers. With Nigeria's inflation rate at 15.91% in June 2026, affordability remains a major consideration for consumers.

For MTN, that creates a delicate balancing act.

The company wants to attract millions of new customers because subscriber growth expands its addressable market.

But if those new customers spend significantly less than the existing customer base, the average amount generated per subscriber can fall even while total revenue increases.

That appears to be part of what is happening.

MTN's numbers therefore tell two stories simultaneously:

The company is getting bigger.

But the average customer is becoming less valuable.

The tariff boost is losing its power

To understand why this matters, it is necessary to look back at 2025.

MTN Nigeria increased tariffs by 50% early that year.

The impact was immediate.

By the second quarter of 2025, service revenue had grown 67.9% year-on-year.

Higher prices meant MTN could generate significantly more revenue from its existing customer base without needing an equivalent increase in subscribers.

A year later, that effect is no longer as powerful.

Service revenue growth in Q2 2026 slowed to 13.3% year-on-year.

MTN Nigeria's CEO, Karl Toriola, said the moderation primarily reflected the full annualisation of previous price adjustments.

In simple terms, the major price increase has now been absorbed into the company's year-on-year comparisons.

MTN cannot keep getting the same growth boost from a price increase it implemented more than a year ago.

That changes the growth equation.

MTN now has to make customers use more

MTN's next challenge is therefore not simply acquiring more subscribers.

It is getting existing and new customers to consume more services.

And the biggest opportunity is data.

Data revenue increased 38.4% in H1 2026, supported by growth in active data users.

Average data usage per subscriber increased 15.2%, while total data traffic increased 25.8%.

Nigeria's overall data consumption also rose significantly, increasing by 46.75% year-on-year in June 2026.

This is exactly the kind of growth MTN needs.

Instead of relying on another large tariff increase, the company can increase revenue by encouraging customers to consume more data.

More streaming.

More social media.

More video.

More cloud services.

More online work.

More mobile applications.

As Nigerians spend more of their lives online, the amount of data they consume becomes increasingly important to telecom operators.

MTN is already encouraging this behaviour through bundles and offers targeting platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.

The strategy is straightforward:

If prices cannot keep doing the heavy lifting, usage has to.

Nigeria gives MTN scale, but not the highest value per customer

There is another number that makes MTN Nigeria's situation particularly interesting.

Nigeria is by far one of MTN Group's biggest markets by subscriber numbers.

But it is not its most valuable market on a per-user basis.

In Q2 2026:

• MTN Nigeria: 92.2 million subscribers, $3.41 ARPU

• MTN Ghana: 32.8 million subscribers, $6.66 ARPU

• MTN South Africa: 39.5 million subscribers, $5.26 ARPU

Nigeria therefore has almost three times Ghana's subscriber base, but Ghana generates roughly twice as much revenue per user.

That does not make Nigeria less important.

Quite the opposite.

Nigeria contributed approximately 30.64% of MTN Group's $7.15 billion H1 2026 revenue.

Nigeria is the scale engine.

The challenge is converting that scale into greater value.

The affordability problem

There is a reason MTN cannot simply push prices higher again.

Nigeria remains a highly price-sensitive market.

Inflation has increased pressure on household incomes, while smartphones and data remain essential but competing expenses.

MTN's own management acknowledges this tension.

Ayham Moussa, the company's chief operating officer, explained that MTN may shift between customer acquisition and yield depending on market conditions.

When affordability is constrained, the company can prioritise attracting users and driving usage.

When consumption is stronger, it can focus more on yield.

This is a fundamentally different growth strategy from simply raising prices.

MTN has to find the point where customers feel they are receiving enough value to keep consuming data while the company still earns attractive returns.

That is where pricing and customer value become increasingly important.

Smartphones could determine how far the data opportunity goes

There is still substantial room for data growth in Nigeria.

Smartphone penetration on MTN's network stood at 66.4% in H1 2026.

That leaves a significant portion of the subscriber base without smartphones capable of supporting the same level of data consumption as higher-end devices.

Broadband penetration across Nigeria stood at 56.79%.

As more consumers move to smartphones and faster 4G and 5G connections, MTN has an opportunity to move customers towards higher-value data services.

But there is a problem.

Smartphones are becoming more expensive for consumers facing persistent inflation.

If device affordability slows smartphone adoption, it could also slow the migration of lower-value customers into higher-value data users.

For MTN, therefore, the smartphone is not simply a device.

It is part of the monetisation pipeline.

Home broadband gives MTN another route to growth

MTN is also looking beyond mobile data.

The company is increasingly targeting the home broadband market through fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and 5G fixed wireless access.

That matters because it allows MTN to monetise customers beyond the traditional mobile connection.

A household that uses MTN for its mobile phone could also become an MTN broadband customer.

The company says it currently represents around 90% of fibre connections based on NCC data and is focusing FTTH deployment on high-value locations and areas where the conversion from homes passed to homes connected is strongest.

Its 5G fixed wireless access service provides another way to expand broadband coverage without relying entirely on fibre infrastructure.

This creates another potential growth engine.

Instead of asking a customer to spend more on their mobile phone alone, MTN can capture more of the household's total connectivity spending.

Then there is fintech

Perhaps MTN's most ambitious opportunity sits outside traditional telecommunications.

The company is trying to turn its massive telecom customer base into a financial-services customer base.

MTN currently has approximately five million fintech subscribers and is targeting 30 million over the medium term.

That would represent a major expansion.

MTN does not need to find 30 million completely new customers.

It already has 92.2 million telecom subscribers.

The challenge is converting more of those existing customers into users of financial services.

As Ralph Mupita, MTN Group's CEO, explained, the strategy involves converting more Nigerian telecom customers into fintech customers.

The opportunity is enormous.

NIBSS data put the value of Nigeria's mobile money market at ₦20.71 trillion in Q1 2025.

But MTN is entering a market where competitors such as OPay and PalmPay have already built strong consumer relationships.

That means MTN's brand recognition and enormous subscriber base give it an advantage, but they do not automatically translate into fintech success.

Financial services require a different set of capabilities, including lending, payments, savings, risk management and customer trust.

MTN therefore has to prove that its telecom scale can translate into financial-services usage.

MTN cannot simply depend on another tariff increase

The company's current position creates an interesting strategic problem.

In 2025, MTN could increase prices and immediately improve the economics of its customer base.

That lever is becoming less powerful.

The next stage is harder.

MTN has to make customers more valuable without making the service unaffordable.

That means encouraging more data consumption.

Moving more customers onto smartphones.

Increasing adoption of 4G and 5G.

Expanding home broadband.

Growing fintech usage.

And potentially developing new digital services that generate revenue beyond connectivity.

The company therefore needs to move from a model where growth can be driven primarily by price to one where growth increasingly comes from usage and customer depth.

Scale can only carry MTN so far

There is still plenty of room for MTN Nigeria to grow.

The country is expected to add tens of millions of unique mobile subscribers over the coming years, while broadband adoption remains below saturation.

That means MTN can continue expanding its customer base.

But subscriber growth cannot continue indefinitely at the same pace.

Eventually, the market becomes more mature.

When that happens, the question changes from:

“How many people can MTN connect?”

to:

“How much can MTN earn from each connected customer?”

That is where ARPU becomes critical.

A falling ARPU is not necessarily a crisis when subscriber growth is strong.

But it becomes more important if subscriber growth begins to slow.

If MTN eventually reaches a point where it is adding fewer customers, it will need to generate more revenue from the customers already on its network.

That is a much harder form of growth.

The numbers reveal MTN's next challenge

MTN Nigeria's H1 2026 results are therefore stronger than the falling ARPU figure might initially suggest.

Revenue is growing.

Subscribers are growing.

Data usage is growing.

Data revenue is growing.

The problem is that these gains are not happening evenly across the customer base.

The company's subscriber growth appears to be bringing in a significant number of price-sensitive users, while the impact of the previous tariff increase is beginning to fade.

That means MTN's next growth phase cannot simply repeat the playbook of 2025.

It needs to make the network more valuable to customers.

And then capture a larger share of that value.

The bigger opportunity is deeper customer value

MTN Nigeria's 92.2 million subscribers remain its biggest competitive advantage.

Few companies in Nigeria have direct access to such a large consumer base.

The question is what MTN does with it.

A subscriber who only makes occasional calls is one type of customer.

A subscriber who consumes large amounts of data, uses 5G, pays for home broadband and uses MTN's financial services is considerably more valuable.

That is the transformation MTN is trying to create.

The company does not necessarily need every customer to spend dramatically more on mobile services.

It needs customers to use more of the services available across its ecosystem.

That could include mobile connectivity, broadband, fintech and other digital products.

From price-led growth to usage-led growth

MTN Nigeria's 2025 story was largely about pricing.

Its 2026 story is increasingly about monetisation.

The tariff increase helped the company earn substantially more from its existing customers.

Now that effect has largely been annualised, MTN needs to find new ways to increase revenue.

Data is the immediate opportunity.

Broadband is another.

Fintech could become the longer-term opportunity.

But all three depend on the same thing:

customers finding enough value to keep using more services.

That is why the falling ARPU deserves attention even as MTN reports record revenue.

The telecom operator is not running out of customers.

It is trying to figure out how to make its enormous customer base more valuable without pricing those customers out of the services they need.

For now, MTN still has the advantage of scale.

But scale alone will not be enough forever.

As Nigeria's telecom market matures, the companies that win will be those that can turn connectivity into deeper, more frequent and more valuable customer relationships.

MTN Nigeria has already built the scale.

Its next challenge is monetising it.