IN SHORT: MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa collectively generated N3.6 trillion ($2.3 billion) from data consumption in 2025 as smartphone penetration accelerated across the continent. Kenya separately added 4.07 million new smartphone subscribers in the same period, with 5G users consuming 46.4GB per user.
Nigeria’s two dominant telecoms operators, MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa, raked in a combined N3.6 trillion ($2.3 billion) from data services in 2025, as Africa’s mobile internet boom delivers telco revenues that now rival the largest banking sector income lines on the continent.
- The combined data revenue of $2.3 billion from two operators in a single market in one year surpasses the total startup funding raised across all of Africa in Q1 2026 ($705 million) by more than three times, illustrating where the real scale economy sits in African tech.
- Kenya’s telecoms regulator reported 4.07 million new smartphone subscribers during the same period. 5G users in Kenya consumed 46.4GB per user on average, the highest consumption rate on the network, signalling the monetisation potential of premium data tiers as 5G coverage expands.
- MTN Ghana’s ARPU of $6.76 remains the highest in the MTN Group, above Nigeria, demonstrating that data monetisation in Africa is not uniform and that mid-income markets with high smartphone penetration can outperform larger markets on a per-user basis.
- Africa’s total telecoms revenue is on track to cross $100 billion annually by 2027 according to GSMA projections, driven by data rather than voice, which is in structural decline across all major markets.
- The data boom is accelerating infrastructure investment: Morocco signed a $1.2 billion deal for Africa’s first sovereign AI computing infrastructure at GITEX Africa in April, and Nigeria’s first AI data centres are expected to come online in 2026, both requiring the data backbone that MTN and Airtel are building.
The revenue scale matters for a reason that goes beyond the telcos themselves. MTN and Airtel are the pipes through which Africa’s fintech, e-commerce, agritech and healthtech ecosystems operate. Every M-Pesa transaction, every OPay PoS payment, every Flutterwave settlement runs on their infrastructure. When data revenues compound, it reflects rising digital economic activity across the board.
The Bigger Picture: Africa’s mobile data economy is generating institutional-scale revenues from a base that is still in the early stages of smartphone penetration. Nigeria’s subscriber base of 200 million-plus is less than 60% smartphone-enabled. Kenya’s 4.07 million new smartphone additions in a single year show the pace of the shift. As the remaining feature phone users migrate to smartphones over the next five years, MTN and Airtel are sitting on one of the largest organic growth runways of any sector on the continent.
Source: Nairametrics / The Exchange Africa
