MTN Nigeria is growing at an impressive pace. Its customer base is expanding, revenue is rising, and data consumption continues to climb.
But there is a problem hiding underneath those numbers: the average MTN customer is contributing less revenue to the business.
In the first half of 2026, MTN Nigeria recorded ₦2.99 trillion ($2.25 billion) in service revenue, representing a 25.9% increase from the same period in 2025. Its subscriber base also grew by 8.9% to a record 92.2 million customers.
Yet average revenue per user (ARPU) declined.
Dollar-denominated ARPU fell 8.82% to $3.41 in Q2 2026, while local-currency ARPU dropped 1.67% to ₦5,101.
That combination tells an important story about Nigeria's telecom market: MTN is getting bigger, but growth is becoming harder to extract from each individual customer.
MTN's strong revenue growth in 2025 was driven largely by higher prices.
In early 2025, the company implemented a 50% tariff increase, following regulatory approval for operators to adjust prices. By Q2 2025, MTN Nigeria's service revenue had grown 67.9% year-on-year.
The impact was significant. MTN could earn substantially more from customers it already had without necessarily needing millions of new subscribers.
But that effect could not last forever.
By Q2 2026, the previous tariff adjustments had been fully annualised, and quarterly revenue growth had slowed to 13.3%.
“Growth moderated in Q2, primarily reflecting the full annualisation of prior price adjustments,” MTN Nigeria CEO Karl Toriola said in the company's H1 results.
This means MTN can no longer depend on price increases as its primary growth engine.
The next challenge is more complicated: getting customers to consume more services while keeping those services affordable enough to retain them.
MTN added 7.5 million subscribers during the first half of 2026, taking its total customer base to 92.2 million.
That is a major achievement, but rapid customer acquisition can also put pressure on ARPU.
Nigeria's cost-of-living pressures remain significant, with inflation at 15.91% in June 2026. For many consumers, telecommunications spending has to compete with food, transportation, housing and other essential expenses.
MTN's chief operating officer, Ayham Moussa, explained that the company adjusts its strategy depending on market conditions.
During periods when customers can spend more, MTN can focus on increasing revenue per user. When affordability becomes more challenging, the company may instead prioritise acquiring users and encouraging usage.
The result is a delicate balance between customer growth and customer value.
For now, MTN appears to be choosing scale.
If MTN wants to increase the value of its customer base without simply raising prices, data is the obvious opportunity.
Average data usage per subscriber increased 15.2% in H1 2026, while total data traffic rose 25.8%. Smartphone penetration also reached 66.4%.
More importantly, data revenue increased 38.4% during the period.
That is considerably stronger than overall service revenue growth.
“Data remains our largest structural growth opportunity,” Toriola said.
The opportunity is particularly important because Nigeria is still a relatively low-ARPU market compared with some other MTN markets.
MTN Nigeria has the group's largest subscriber base at 92.2 million.
For comparison:
Nigeria has almost three times Ghana's subscriber base, but Ghana generates roughly twice as much revenue per customer.
This highlights MTN Nigeria's central opportunity.
The company does not necessarily need to find another 90 million customers. It needs to find ways to make its existing 92.2 million customers more valuable.
There is still plenty of room for growth.
Nigeria's broadband penetration stood at 56.79%, while the country is expected to add millions of unique mobile subscribers between 2025 and 2030.
But converting that opportunity into higher revenue is not guaranteed.
Smartphones are becoming more expensive, creating another barrier for price-sensitive consumers who might otherwise move from basic connectivity to higher-value data services.
For MTN, smartphone adoption matters because customers with smartphones are more likely to consume video, social media, streaming, cloud services and other data-intensive products.
The company is already encouraging this behaviour through bundles targeted at platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.
The bigger question is whether customers can afford to keep consuming more.
MTN is also looking beyond traditional mobile data.
The company is expanding its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) business and using 5G fixed wireless access to reach more households.
This could become an important part of its strategy because home internet allows MTN to monetise customers beyond their mobile phones.
Instead of relying entirely on mobile data bundles, the company can sell higher-value broadband connections to households, businesses and other customers.
It also gives MTN another way to benefit from Nigeria's growing demand for reliable, high-speed internet.
There is another part of the strategy that could become even more significant: financial services.
MTN Nigeria currently has about 5 million fintech customers and wants to reach 30 million over the medium term.
The logic is straightforward.
MTN already has access to 92.2 million customers. If even a fraction of them begin using its financial products, the company could create an entirely new revenue stream without having to acquire them from scratch.
The opportunity is significant, but competition is intense.
Digital financial services in Nigeria are already dominated by established fintech players, while MTN is still expanding its capabilities across areas such as payments and lending.
So fintech could become a major growth engine, but it will require investment and strong execution.
Despite its lower ARPU, Nigeria remains extremely important to the MTN Group.
The group generated ZAR 115.32 billion ($7.15 billion) in revenue during H1 2026, with Nigeria contributing approximately 30.64% of the total.
That demonstrates why Nigeria's huge customer base remains strategically valuable.
The issue is not whether MTN should continue investing in Nigeria.
It is how much value it can extract from the customers it already has.
MTN Nigeria's 92.2 million subscribers give it an enormous advantage.
But scale eventually reaches a limit.
As subscriber growth slows, simply adding more customers will become less effective as a growth strategy. At that point, MTN will need to increase revenue through deeper engagement with its existing customers.
That could mean:
The strategy is already taking shape.
MTN is moving from “How do we get more customers?” to a more difficult question:
“How do we make our existing customers more valuable?”
MTN Nigeria's H1 2026 results show a business that is still growing strongly, but the nature of that growth is changing.
In 2025, higher tariffs did much of the heavy lifting.
In 2026, MTN has a record customer base, stronger data consumption and several opportunities to diversify beyond traditional mobile services. But customers are also more price-sensitive, smartphone affordability remains a challenge, and ARPU is under pressure.
The company cannot simply keep raising prices.
Its next phase of growth will depend on convincing millions of Nigerians to use more, connect more and eventually buy more services from the same ecosystem.
MTN already has the scale.
Now it has to prove that scale can become deeper customer value.