Exclusive / MTN targets fintech acquisitions, East Africa push: CEO

Mupita was appointed CEO in 2017, inheriting a sprawling telecoms group operating across more than 20 markets, many of them volatile and capital-intensive. Since then, MTN has exited several markets and narrowed its footprint to 16 sub-Saharan African countries, anchored by Nigeria — its largest and most important market — and South Africa, where it remains a sector leader. Nigeria alone accounts for roughly 85 million customers, making it central to both earnings and investor sentiment.

But Mupita’s ambitions stretch beyond defending core markets. As MTN builds out its fintech and infrastructure platforms, he is increasingly focused on deepening the group’s pan-African footprint — not necessarily by launching full mobile operations everywhere, but by entering selectively with specific capabilities.

That thinking has sharpened interest in East Africa, where MTN believes it is underweight relative to west-central and southern Africa. The company operates in Uganda and Rwanda but is absent from larger markets such as Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.

MTN walked away from Ethiopia’s telecom liberalization process in 2021 after its $600 million license bid was rejected. “The opportunity [for Ethiopia] is attractive,” he said. “It just wasn’t right at that price, at that time.”

Crucially, Mupita said any future move into East Africa may not follow the traditional telecom playbook. “We may enter markets with one or two platforms,” he said, pointing to fintech or digital infrastructure as possible entry points.

That approach leaves the door open to acquisitions — including fintech deals — as a way of building presence without the heavy costs of full network rollouts.

Mupita’s dealmaking push is built on a blunt premise: Consolidation is no longer optional for African telecoms — and fintech is where that logic is now hardest to ignore.

Telecoms, he told me, has become a scale game. Data usage keeps climbing, but power and network costs also keep rising, and operators must invest constantly just to hold their ground. Smaller players are squeezed, while groups with deep balance sheets and distribution can spread those costs across tens of millions of users. “This is now a capital-intensive industry where only majors can really survive,” Mupita said.

Fintech, in many ways, is starting to look the same. Over the past decade, some of Africa’s most ambitious players — Flutterwave, Moniepoint, Paystack, and Chipper Cash among them — have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build payments infrastructure, business banking tools, and cross-border rails. At various points, several were valued well north of $1 billion, reflecting big bets on how fast Africa’s underbanked markets would scale.

That optimism is now being tested. Funding has tightened, exits have proved elusive, and some global investors are quietly questioning whether returns will arrive on venture timelines. In that environment, strategic buyers may start to look more realistic than IPOs.

For MTN, buying one of those platforms would be costly — and far from risk-free — but potentially transformative. Acquiring an established fintech could accelerate its shift from a voice-led telco into a full-stack digital services group, deepen payments and lending offerings, and lock in merchants and consumers.

A skeptic, however, would naturally question whether integration at that scale is as seamless as Mupita suggests — or whether regulatory complexity, execution risk, and valuation expectations could blunt the upside. He counters that consolidation is ultimately unavoidable and not just in Africa. For local telcos facing slowing voice growth, he argues, fintech M&A is less a bold gamble than a necessary bet on relevance in a market where scale increasingly decides who survives.

Not everyone is convinced MTN’s reinvention will be smooth. Despite paring back its Middle East footprint in Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria over the last decade, the group still carries costly geopolitical baggage.

Mupita acknowledged lingering exposure to Iran, where US-led sanctions in 2018 have frozen its 49% stake in Irancell and limited its strategic options to fully exit the market. That exposure was back in the headlines last month when it was blindsided after Iran’s state-backed majority owners moved to enforce a nationwide communications shutdown during a deadly crackdown on protests. Iranian authorities replaced Irancell’s chief executive for allegedly delaying compliance with shutdown orders, without informing MTN.

MTN is also still dealing with lawsuits related to its former operations in Afghanistan.