MTN Ghana’s half-year results for 2026 raise an important corporate accountability question. When a telecommunications company earns billions of cedis while customers question data consumption, unstable connections, dropped calls, delayed complaint resolution and expensive bundles, should the result be celebrated as innovation or examined as a possible business rip-off?
Profit is necessary for network expansion, employment, taxes, dividends and technology upgrades. However, in an essential service industry dominated by one operator, profit must be assessed against affordability, reliability, transparency, coverage and customer satisfaction. MTN’s success is, therefore, a public interest test of whether commercial value is being converted into customer value.
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Scancom PLC, which operates as MTN Ghana, reported service revenue of about GH¢14.9 billion for the six months ending June 30, 2026, up 32.3 per cent from GH¢11.3 billion. Data revenue rose 47.1 per cent to GH¢8.8 billion, supported by 21.3 million active data subscribers and average monthly usage of 19.3 gigabytes per user. Mobile Money generated about GH¢3.5 billion, while active users reached 18.3 million.
The Ghana Stock Exchange published the company’s performance report on July 31, 2026.
A clarification is necessary. One report described profit before tax as GH¢7.4 billion, representing 44.5 per cent growth from GH¢5.1 billion in 2025. The more detailed investor results summary reported GH¢5.1 billion as profit after tax for 2026 and stated that profit before tax increased 56.4 per cent to GH¢7.4 billion. The difference appears to reflect confusion between profit before tax and profit after tax.
As a rough ratio, profit before tax was about 49.7 per cent of service revenue, although this is not a formal accounting profit margin. Data and Mobile Money together contributed more than four-fifths of revenue. MTN is, therefore, becoming a digital infrastructure, payments, entertainment and financial services platform.
Customer Experience?
A rip-off occurs when market power, information imbalance or opaque pricing is used to extract excessive value without proportionate benefits. Customer experience enhancement occurs when revenue finances faster speeds, wider coverage, safer transactions, better support and affordable packages.
MTN’s growth has genuine demand-based foundations. Customers are consuming more data and moving business, education, health, entertainment and government interactions online. MTN also announced plans to invest US$1.1 billion in Ghana over three years and deploy at least 500 new network sites by the end of 2026. These commitments support the argument that stronger earnings can finance better infrastructure and customer experience.
Yet competition cannot be ignored. By June 2026, MTN held 80.10 per cent of mobile data subscriptions and 72.51 per cent of mobile voice subscriptions. It had approximately 24.44 million mobile data subscriptions and 32.01 million mobile voice subscriptions.
MTN was formally declared a Significant Market Power operator in the voice, data and messaging markets in 2020. Dominance does not prove abuse, but it requires the National Communications Authority to test prices, promotions, service quality and customer complaints independently.
A March 2026 disruption affected 57 sites in each of the 2G, 3G and 4G categories, together with fibre services in parts of Accra. The incident was attributed to cuts affecting three transmission fibre cables. Services were subsequently restored, but the experience demonstrated how dependent hospitals, homes and businesses have become on network resilience.