Chief executive officer’s review
Our chief executive officer, Sunil Taldar, reflects on a year in which Airtel Africa delivered strong operational and financial performance and remained committed to transforming lives, while navigating a complex and sometimes challenging operating environment.
Sunil Taldar
Chief executive officer
Q1.
What stands out for you about Airtel Africa’s performance in 2024/25?
We’ve successfully executed our strategy – and that has delivered growth now while showing the path for continued future growth. Our ability to fulfil our purpose of transforming lives and to create value for our shareholders and other stakeholders depends on this sustainable growth.
We know there’s a huge opportunity in our markets. It’s not just that the populations are young and growing fast, or that there is still a long runway ahead in terms of smartphone ownership and network penetration. It is also that people in our 14 markets across sub-Saharan Africa have powerful aspirations. They want access to the opportunities of digitalisation and connection – in education, healthcare, commerce, news, entertainment and financial services. Serving those aspirations has meant that we’ve continued to be the fastest-growing telco in Africa this year on a constant currency basis – and have the potential to drive sustainable growth for years to come. But only if we keep delivering on our strategy, as our people across the business continue to do – which is why the quality of our execution is my highlight for this year.
Q2.
You refined your strategy in 2024/25 – why was this important?
Everything we do has always been about serving and empowering our customers. In places which are often underserved by infrastructure, our services are transformational for them – and essential for their lives and livelihoods. They rightly have high expectations for those services – and meeting their expectations gives us competitive advantage. So, we refined our strategy this year to reinforce the fact that enhancing the customer experience should drive all our actions.
Great customer experience is of course a continuing journey, rather than a destination. It means getting better every year. For example, we’ve continued to invest in brilliant network experience, rolling out around 2,600 new sites and 3,300 km of new fibre. We’ve put further investment into growth opportunities such as home broadband and our enterprise offers. And we’ve also invested in ’go-to-market’ – getting closer to our customers so that using our mobile money and telecoms services is fast and convenient. That includes expanding our physical activating outlet network by 8% to over 390,000 outlets. This is supported by digitising and simplifying how customers access our services, drawing on the expertise and digital toolkit of Bharti Airtel to drive improvements in our MyAirtel app and the functionality of other digital products.
Q3.
How would you describe this year’s financial performance?
Overall, this has been a strong year financially, with revenue growth in constant currency across all our services, with data and mobile money revenues both growing by around 30%.
There have been challenges at times during the year. The first quarter, in particular, saw some macroeconomic disturbance in some markets, including further currency devaluation in Nigeria. Some markets also saw some political disturbance and continuing inflation, including fuel price inflation. More recently, we’ve seen significant global economic developments, which we’re monitoring closely for their effects on our markets.
We know that customers feel these cost-of-living pressures. It is striking, however, that despite these disturbances our customer base continued to grow, reaching 166.1 million by year end and average revenue per user increased by 12.4% in constant currency. Customers are using our services more – and using more services.
Cost pressures also affect our business and, particularly, our margins which were down by 2.3% in 2024/25. This year, we launched a cost efficiency programme to reduce costs across the business. These initiatives have contributed to a steady improvement in underlying EBITDA margins from 45.3% in Q1’25 to 47.3% in Q4’25 – and, most importantly, helped us keep services affordable for customers. Initiatives within our cost efficiency programme have also supported our sustainability strategy – moving around 500 sites from off-grid to on-grid has resulted in the saving of around 350,000 litres of fuel.
44.8%
smartphone penetration (+4.3% vs 2023/24)
47.5%
increase in data usage vs 2023/24
32%
increase in transaction value for Airtel Money (in constant currency)
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People in our markets have powerful aspirations. They want access to the transformational opportunities of digitalisation, financial inclusion and connectivity. Serving those aspirations has meant we’ve delivered the fastest constant currency revenue growth performance in the African telecoms sector this year.
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Sunil Taldar
Chief executive officer
Q4.
Last year, volatility in your largest market, Nigeria, affected Group financial performance. How has that market performed in 2024/25?
The Nigerian market saw continued economic volatility which impacted both the industry and our customers. However, we’ve seen some encouraging macroeconomic signs in the past couple of quarters, with inflation trending down, improved foreign exchange availability and a relatively stable currency.
It is also worth highlighting the approvals we received in January 2025 for a tariff adjustment of up to 50%. This is a very positive development and will contribute significantly to a sustainable future for the industry as well as to the Nigerian Government’s agenda for digital transformation and a stronger economy. We’re very grateful to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for this decision and have seen an encouraging response from our customers. The sustained demand reflects the essential nature of the services that we offer and gives us the platform to continue investing in the network, expanding coverage to communities across the country and delivering an enhanced product offering that meets customers’ evolving needs.
Given the extraordinary aspiration and entrepreneurship of Nigerian customers and the demographic potential of a country with an average age of 17.9 years, Nigeria remains one of our biggest opportunities for growth.
Q5.
Airtel Money has seen over 17% customer base growth in 2024/25. What is driving this expansion?
Airtel Money creates financial inclusion. Our markets remain significantly underbanked, and demand for financial services is accelerating. As businesses expand, and as customers upgrade to smartphones, we see this opportunity continuing to grow. Airtel Money transaction values grew by 32% this year in constant currency and its revenues reached $994m, including airtime recharges in Airtel Money. We’ve supported this growth from several angles, including enhancing customer experience through digital improvements that have driven increased adoption of MyAirtel app, increasing the use cases for Airtel Money as well as building the merchant and B2B ecosystems.
With regards to the IPO of Airtel Money, we're making significant progress in our preparations and remain committed to this objective. However, we're also mindful of evolving market conditions. Therefore, subject to these conditions, we anticipate a listing event in the first half of calendar 2026.
Q6.
How do you support your purpose of transforming lives?
I know that transforming lives guides everyone at Airtel Africa and helps teams deliver in sometimes challenging conditions, as they have this year. I also know how important it is to all our other stakeholders who're essential to the impact we can have on sustainable development. As in past years, we’ve published a separate sustainability report to give stakeholders a full and transparent account of our progress.
This year saw the launch of the Airtel Africa Foundation which is set up to give even more structure and scale to the work we were already doing in education, digital literacy, inclusion and the environment. The Foundation will now be an important way we accelerate transforming lives – closely linked to the business, with programmes carried out by our operating teams. The Foundation leads our partnership with UNICEF – a five-year, $57m commitment to connect schools to the internet and provide free access to online educational platforms across 13 markets. The Foundation has also already launched fellowships for students studying AI and data science, and it’s backing local sustainability projects, from reforestation to solar power.
Every day we see the benefits of digital and financial inclusion for the people we connect. And every day, we connect more people, to more services. Transforming lives is not the by-product of our growth – it is the engine that drives it.
Sunil Taldar
Chief executive officer
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Every day we see the benefits of digital and financial inclusion for the people we connect. And every day, we connect more people, to more services.
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Sunil Taldar
Chief executive officer