Condia Insider: Data has the crown in Africa’s telecoms

🍔 Quick Bite: Africa’s largest telecoms are making more money from data than voice calls, with MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa both crossing this milestone.

🧠 The Breakdown

Africa’s largest mobile operators are making more money from data than voice calls. MTN Nigeria’s Q1 2025 results show data revenue at ₦1.23 trillion against voice at ₦887 billion. Airtel Africa crossed the same line, with data pulling in $549 million compared to voice at $533 million for the quarter ended June 2025.

After years of voice dominance, there seems to be a reset of the business model that built Africa’s telecom industry.

What is “killing” voice?

WhatsApp is killing it. So is Telegram and Facebook Messenger. These apps turned voice calls into something that costs less, and once people made the switch, traditional voice calls have not been able to recover

The 50% tariff hike approved by Nigeria’s NCC in January 2025 accelerated the migration. When MTN started implementing the new prices in February, some subscribers pushed back on social media. But many others simply moved on to WhatsApp and other social media apps. The math made sense: why pay more for traditional voice when internet calling is free?

The impact shows up clearly in the revenue numbers. MTN Nigeria’s data revenue jumped 49% in 2024, while voice growth stalled. OTT platforms have been competing directly with traditional voice and messaging services, leading to what the industry calls revenue erosion. African telecoms have seen voice and SMS revenues drop at an accelerated rate, and the trend isn’t reversing.

But telecoms are still winning. They might have lost ground on voice revenue, but they have also gained. Every WhatsApp call runs on their data networks. Every Instagram video, every TikTok scroll, every YouTube binge. That’s all data they’re selling. And unlike voice minutes, data consumption keeps climbing month after month.

The infrastructure gamble

African operators saw this shift coming years ago and poured billions into preparing for it. MTN Nigeria pushed 4G coverage to 82.7% of the population by Q1 2025. Airtel Africa built over 2,350 new network sites and laid thousands of kilometres of fibre across the continent.

They got the timing right. Smartphone penetration across Airtel’s markets jumped to 46.8%, up from 38% just two years earlier. Chinese brands flooded African markets with phones cheap enough for mass adoption. People who spent years making only voice calls suddenly had YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok in their pockets.

The consumption patterns have also changed. Nigerians now average 8.15GB per month, more than double what they used two years ago. That’s not just more revenue than voice. It’s a fundamentally different business with better margins and room to grow.

What comes next

Data is big, but it’s not the end game. Mobile money is growing faster than data did at its peak.

MTN’s fintech revenue shot up 35.7%. They now have 64.3 million users on MoMo. Airtel Money processed $193 billion in transactions over the past year, up 36%.

This is the prize. Voice made telecoms into utilities. Data made them into infrastructure plays. But fintech could turn them into the financial backbone of the continent.

Sub-Saharan Africa already has 1.1 billion registered mobile money accounts. That’s two-thirds of the global total. In markets where banks never built branches, telecoms became the de facto financial system.

Voice was act one. Data is act two. Fintech looks like it might be the biggest act of all.