MTN (South Africa): Post-apartheid bet became Africa's largest telco
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Show notes
On the afternoon of October 26th, 2015, a regulator in Abuja issued a press release. The number on the page was one trillion and forty billion naira. In US dollars, it was five point two billion. It was the largest regulatory fine ever levied on a single company anywhere on Earth.
Within two weeks, MTN's share price on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange had collapsed by a quarter. The Group's chief executive, a Zimbabwean engineer named Sifiso Dabengwa, had been forced to resign. And the company that had spent twenty-one years building Africa's largest mobile network was looking at the prospect that a single regulatory ruling, in a single foreign capital, could break it in half.
It was, in many ways, the bill arriving for a strategy that had defined the company since the day it was born — going where the political risk was highest, because that was also where the customers were.
This is the story of MTN Group.
