Telkom SA racks up more mobile subscribersTelkom SA racks up more mobile subscribers

Telkom South Africa is seeing significant growth in its mobile subscribers, as it edges closer to the country's two biggest operators, Vodacom and MTN.

This week, Telkom SA revealed that its number of mobile subscribers grew by 21.6% year-on-year (YoY) for the quarter ended December 31, 2024, to a record 24 million mobile users.

This followed a 24.6% YoY increase in mobile subscribers recorded in the six months to September 30, 2024.

In fact, the SA operator added 3.6 million new users between the end of March and December 2024.

In comparison, the country's biggest operator, Vodacom, last week reported a 1.1% YoY contraction in its mobile subscribers in South Africa, to 50.7 million at the end of December 2024.

Telkom's mobile data subscribers expanded by 17.3% YoY to 14.9 million, representing 62.3% of the total subscriber base, and this drove mobile data traffic to grow by 22.2% to 452 petabytes.

All of this led to an uptick in mobile service revenue of 9.6% YoY, "outperforming the broader South African mobile market," according to Telkom.

"These results provide further proof that the execution of Telkom's strategy is on track, delivering profitable growth. We are excited by the growing momentum across our business units, and we remain confident in our ability to meet our medium-term growth objectives as we continue to invest in our infrastructure, network and digital services," said Telkom Group CEO Serame Taukobong.

Related:Telkom SA now has over 20M mobile subs

Telkom Group CEO Serame Taukobong. (Source: Telkom Group)

Vodacom still leads the South African market with 50.7 million mobile users at the end of last year, but Telkom's growth to 24 million users inches it a bit closer to second-placed MTN.

MTN's official quarterly update for the end of September 2024 put its total users in South Africa at 39.2 million.

Fourth-placed Cell C has been trying to claw back market share, but only had 7.7 million mobile subscribers at the end of May 2024.

Meanwhile, Rain is estimated to only have around 750,000 subscribers.

Telkom's growth over the last decade

Telkom may still be facing a significant gap to its top rivals, but what is clear is that the operator is growing consistently.

Statistics from market research company Omdia, a sister company of Connecting Africa, show that ten years ago Telkom, which started off as a fixed-line operator, only had 2.1 million mobile users.

Flash forward to the end of 2018, and this had almost quadrupled to 8.1 million.

Two years later, in 2020, its subscribers rose to 15.3 million. From there, subscribers ticked up to 19.7 million by the end of 2023, and to 24 million in 2024.

Vodacom grows users outside of SA

Despite challenges to onboard more subscribers in South Africa, Vodacom Group has been growing its subscriber base in other African operations.

Tanzania saw a 15% YoY increase last year to almost 22 million mobile users; the Democratic Republic of Congo recorded a 6.2% YoY jump, to 22.8 million mobile customers; and Mozambique grew 4.4% YoY, to 12 million mobile users. In Egypt, subscribers rose 6.2% YoY, to 50.7 million.

The only other market that declined besides SA was Lesotho, which recorded a 4.7% drop to 1.5 million mobile subscribers at the end of 2024.