Rising Fuel Prices Could Affect MTN Nigeria's profitability

MTN Nigeria has warned that rising fuel prices could affect its profitability this year, even as the country’s largest telco operator delivers record revenue growth and rebounds from last year’s currency shocks.

In its Q1 2026 results released on Wednesday, the company said it expects a 1.8 to 2.0% decline in full-year Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation (EBITDA) margins if diesel prices average ₦2,000 ($1.45) per litre in the second half of the year. 

Based on current revenue levels at ₦1.5 trillion ($1.09 billion), an expected decline of 2.0% would translate into an estimated ₦120 billion ($87.24 million) to ₦140 billion ($101.78 million) hit to profits.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Uganda is looking to become a hub for artificial intelligence with Xbox, urging more local investment in air infrastructure, skills and innovation to enough jobs and economic growth from over 2,400 cities and 178 countries. We bring you the Good Morning Africa podcast. Good morning Africa! Welcome aboard your person everything business in Africa. I am Mytha Dong for more follow-ups on Twitter, Advocate Financial News, and you can find me at Mythadong. Uganda is stepping up efforts to position itself as a leader in artificial intelligence. According to David Gonahaser, team lead for Industry 4.0 at the Science, Technology and Innovation Secretariat, AI has the potential to boost Uganda's agriculture, tourism and mineral development strategy by improving efficiency from soil testing to pharma communication and market access. However, he notes that Uganda is not yet fully leveraging AI due to computing infrastructure and reliance on foreign platforms. This interview is done in conjunction with Dennis Segora.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

So my name is David Gonahasa. I am the team lead Industry 4.0 at the Science, Technology and Innovation Secretariat. STI is hosting the Uganda Deep Tech Summit around how do we position Uganda as the center for applied AI on the African continent. Artificial intelligence is changing things very quickly. Of course, there's talk around job losses, there's talk around all the negative parts of it, but also there's a very big positive towards driving efficiency across different sectors. Uganda today has the ATM strategy, and AI could be one of the enablers for a lot of what we are doing. From making it faster on how you do soil sampling to pharma communication to market access and so many other things AI can support to increase or help us achieve our GDP ambitions. So what the Deep Tech Summit does is a chance to convene some of the smartest people from all over the world to speak into what they're doing and how they're doing it and give us a chance to learn from them. So we have a number of stakeholders from different government agencies, we have private sector, we have academia in the room, and we have the opportunity to learn from them. So, for example, what are they doing with infrastructure? Considering our resource constraints, how do we learn from the applications they have put in place? For example, what they call modular data centers. So there's a smaller, lower capacity in terms of energy, but very high compute facilities that are much cheaper than see a tier three data center. You have people coming up with new ways to power data centers from solar or other renewable energies which are being put in place in places like Tunisia. They have mechanisms for grid efficiency where you can actually use the grid not only to manage power generated by the government but also private sector generation supporting data center infrastructure. When you go to things like education, how are you building upskilling of existing trained engineers to be able to become AI specialists? When you think about some of the other pillars that are being discussed, being able to understand use cases of AI. How are these different specialists building AI in their private sector? What are the applications that they're building? So all this really gives us a chance as a country to learn, leverage the brain trust of a number of our colleagues from all over the world, and use it as a way to build out not only strategies, but actually apply this within the STI ecosystem on enabling Ugandans to build artificial intelligence, applications, products, services, enabling infrastructure to allow Uganda to win. AI must be infused in every part of this country's economy, right from the ATMs to education, because education is building the human capital that allows you to do or build some of these things. So there should be AI education as early as possible because AI can support on learning, can support on information, can support on experimentation and so many other things. So students must be able to use AI teachers, must be able to teach AI, and it should be core to the country's academic curriculum development strategy.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

From your own perspective, are we harnessing the full potential for AI?

SPEAKER_02 4:33

No. No, we're not we're not harnessing the full potential of AI, unfortunately, because one we don't have sufficient compute to make it work. Today we still rely heavily on foreign platforms or foreign language, foreign large language models, we need to build our own local language models, we need to build applications for specific use cases or specific industries. So, like I've said, if our strategy as a country is the ATMs, how are we using AI in agriculture, in tourism, in science and technology, in mineral development? And here's the point think of AI like skill, because AI is basically formed on, it's very similar to the human brain. You train the human brain to do things, you train AI to do things. You can train your AI to do soil sampling, you can train your AI to do market communication to farmers, you can train your AI to um map tourists to tourism destinations. So think of AI like a brain that you train. And if you think of it that way, then you have skills that you can embed into all the work that we do as government or as a country.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Second last is about uh is that fee of uh AI taking up jobs? Is it uh skills stand?

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yes, absolutely. AI will take very many jobs, but AI will take structured jobs. Okay. Um, but at the same way, it will create even many more jobs because it creates efficiency. Efficiency means there's demand for more human labor. AI cannot, today at least, AI will not go to the farm and dig. AI is not going to uh do your plumbing work, AI is not going to do so many of the things. AI does not have a conscience, and people still will always need the human interaction. So think of AI as a way to create efficiency, and with efficiency, you have more demand for jobs in other sectors. I think we need to be cognizant that AI is here and AI is here to stay. We can't keep hiding away from it. We need to not only focus on the negative parts of it, but think about what are the positives, what is the opportunity. Uganda needs to not only be a consumer of artificial intelligence, but a builder and building at all the layers, at the energy layer, infrastructure, infrastructure layer, at the application layer, and all the others that exist. Because guess what? If someone is going to build chips using your rare earth, might as well be you. If somebody's going to build data centers, you might as well be the one building them. If someone is building applications, you might as well be building them because the opportunity is here and it is yours as much as it's anyone else's.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

And a quick review of the market. Standard chart of Kenya, the country's eighth largest bank by assets, has reduced its workforce to fewer than 1,000 employees, capping 11 consecutive years of job cats as the lender automates its banking operations across East Africa's largest economy. The lender employed 942 people at the end of 2025, down from 1,100 a year earlier, according to its latest annual report. The decline extends a retrenchment that has seen headcount more than half from a peak of 2048 in 2014. Redundancy costs for the latest financial year totaled about 112 Kenya shillings, 112 million Kenya shillings, about 870,000 US dollars, a sharp fall from 580.1 million Kenyan shillings, approximately 4.4 million dollars in 2024, suggesting a deceleration in the pace of layoffs, even as restructuring continues. Over the past decade, the bank has spent$4.71 billion on workforce reduction. This sustained downsizing reflects a pivot from brick and mortar branches and retail banking tools, wealth management, corporate lending, and digital service delivery, a transition accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but now part of the bank's operations. The Bank of Jamaica's approval will allow the Nairobi-based cross-border payment company to begin operations through a partnership with JN Money Services Limited, a Jamaican payment service company. The deal will enable Wapipe to facilitate transactions between Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, targeting both diaspora emittances and trade link payments. The Jamaican entry could place WAPIPA in a competitive segment of global finance that supports money flows into small and open economies in the emerging market, making it a further entry by Kenyan FinTech into the Caribbean and signalling a trend to its south-south payment corridors. MGN Nigeria has warned that rising fuel prices could affect its profitability this year, even as the country's largest telco operator delivers a record revenue growth and rebounds from last year's current decision talks. It is equal to one 2026 result release on Wednesday. The company said it expects a 1.8 to 2.2% decline in a full year earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, and amortization margins if fuel prices average about 2,000 naira per litre or about$1.45 in the second half of the year. Based on the current revenue level of$1.5 trillion naira or about a billion US dollars, an expected decline of 2% would translate into an estimated$87 million to about$101.78 million hit to profit. After eliminating most of its exposure to foreign exchange volatility, following the repayment of$105 million in dollar-denominated loans in Qtawan, MTN Nigeria now faces a more structural constraint, the rising cost of power. The outlook reflects mounting volatility in Nigeria's fuel market, shaped by both global and domestic pressures in March and escalation in US-Israel-Iran conflict triggered the temporary closure of the strike of homeless, pushing crude up prices to about$100 per barrel. Thank you for always waking up with us. Good morning, Africa with the Panda from Alpha K Financial. If you have suggestions you want to check out more stories, visit the website at advocatefinancial.com. Don't forget to subscribe, you can find us.