IN THE VALLEY: Are you tracking the silent performers of the digital economy?

We obsess over tech. We often forget how it travels from device to device.

Connectivity rarely makes headlines. It is the plumbing of the digital economy. Every TikTok scroll, mobile payment, and WhatsApp or Telegram call across Africa and the Arabian Peninsula (the “Region”) relies on a toll bridge. Telecom operators and tower infrastructure carry the load.

Over the last three decades, a handful of these companies entered public markets. The sample size is small, but the signal is deafeningly clear. This edition of IN THE VALLEY strips away the narrative and focuses on the numbers across 15 key players. We measure the outcomes and isolate the signals that matter.

The Tape: Narrative vs. Numbers

The table below tracks the telecom and tower operators from the Region that have gone public.

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The Players: A Snapshot of the Toll Takers

• MTN Group: The pan-regional giant. (FY24 service rev: ZAR 177.8B / ~$9.7B, -15.4% reported).
• Safaricom: Kenya’s absolute monopoly and the architect of M-Pesa. (FY25 rev: KES 388.7B / ~$3B, +11.2% YoY).
• Telecom Egypt: The incumbent fixed-line godfather. (FY25 operating rev: ~EGP 106.7B / ~$2B, +30.6% YoY).
• MTN Ghana: The dominant player surfing the data/fintech wave. (FY25 rev: GHS 24.4B / ~$2.5B, +36.1% YoY).
• MTN Nigeria: The crown jewel in Africa’s largest economy. (FY24 rev: NGN 5.2T /~$3.7B, +54.8% YoY).
• Airtel Africa: Diversified powerhouse with a massive fintech footprint. (FY24 rev: ~£3.9B / ~$5.2B, -2% YoY).
• e& (Etisalat): The UAE cash machine pivoting to a tech holding company. (FY25 rev: ~AED 72.9B / ~$19.8B, +23.1% YoY).
• Vodacom Group: Vodafone’s African muscle, expanding aggressively into fintech. (FY25 rev: ZAR 150.8B / ~$9B, +1.1% YoY).
• Sonatel: A leading West African telecom operator, one of the largest employer in many nations and Orange affiliate, offering mobile, data, and mobile money services across Senegal and nearby markets. (FY25 rev: ~XOF1.9T / ~$3.4B, +8.3% YoY).
• Ooredoo: Qatar’s global footprint operator. (FY25 rev: QAR 24.6B / ~$6.8B, +4% YoY).
• Saudi Telecom (STC): The bedrock of Vision 2030’s digital pivot. (FY25 rev: SAR 77.8B / ~$20.7B, +2.5% YoY).
• Mobily: Saudi’s fiber and enterprise connectivity challenger. (FY24 rev: SAR 19.6B / ~$5.2B, +7.9% YoY).
• Helios Towers: The landlord. Rents steel to telcos. (FY25 rev: ~$854M, +8% YoY).
• Maroc Telecom: Morocco’s incumbent with multi-country African exposure via subsidiaries, blending stable cash flows with emerging market growth. (FY24 rev: ~MAD 36.7B / ~$3.9B, -0.2% YoY).
• IHS Towers: The Nigerian-founded global tower menace (39k+ towers). (FY24 rev: ~$1.71B, -19.5% YoY).

Across different regulatory regimes and market conditions, the data reveals four consistent strategies and one structural trap.

1. The Business Won. The Currency Lost.

There is a version of reality where MTN Group is the most impressive business in this dataset. Organic service revenue grew 13.8%. Data volumes increased. Fintech scaled.

But you can’t hedge physics, and you can’t outrun emerging market forex. The tower is planted in Lagos; the revenue is collected in Naira. When the Naira collapsed from 907 to 1,535 to the dollar in 2024, a profitable Nigerian operation morphed into a massive R11.2B translation loss on the JSE. This was thankfully corrected in 2025 with a record turnaround and performance.

Vodacom faced the same dynamic. Customer growth and usage expanded, but headline revenue printed at a measly 1.1% increase because the currencies in Tanzania, Mozambique, and the DRC diluted the momentum.

The Signal: For multinational telcos, FX exposure is a structural tax, not a temporary glitch. Smart money buys the constant-currency cash flow. Dumb money reads the headline and panics.

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2. The Best Margins Belong to Companies With Zero Subscribers

Let’s be precise: a tower company is not a telecom company. It is a B2B monopoly. It doesn’t fight price wars on data. It doesn’t run marketing campaigns. It plants a piece of steel in the dirt, and every mobile operator within a 5-mile radius is contractually obligated to pay rent, whether the economy is booming or imploding.

Helios Towers printed a 54% EBITDA margin in H1 2025. The average African telco peaks at 45-47%. Helios beats them by 700+ basis points without acquiring a single consumer. Better yet, their leases have inflation escalators. When inflation runs hot, the telcos eat the cost; Helios collects the yield.

Europe has ~60 towers per 100k people. The US has ~70. Sub-Saharan Africa has fewer than 10. Closing that gap is worth $170B in incremental GDP by 2030. That requires steel.

Source

3- The Great Re-bundling: Buying Back the Steel

For a decade, the telecom playbook was simple: go asset-light. Operators sold their towers to independent companies like IHS, freed up capital, and signed long-term lease agreements.

This is shifting.

In February 2026, MTN Group announced plans to acquire the remaining ~75% stake in IHS Towers in a deal valuing the company at approximately $6.2B, effectively taking control of one of the largest tower portfolios across Africa and emerging markets.

The rationale is operational control. Ownership improves rollout efficiency and supports investment in 4G, 5G, and fiber. It also allows operators to retain more infrastructure economics.

After years of separation, large operators are moving back toward ownership of critical assets.

4. The Operators Who Realized They Were Banks

In the developed markets, banks built digital channels. In Africa, telecom operators built financial systems.

Traditional financial institutions were too slow, so telcos weaponized their SIM cards as the ultimate distribution network. Two players recognized this early and built fortresses:

• Safaricom: Listed at KES 5, now trading near KES 30.6 (+500%). The unlock? M-Pesa. It now drives 40% of their $3B revenue and grows at 15% annually. In 2026, they launched Ziidi Trader. Now, 40 million Kenyans can buy stocks via text, capturing 50% of the country’s latest IPO flow. The network built the audience; fintech built the economics.
• Airtel Africa: Now serving 44.6M fintech users. The impending standalone listing of Airtel Money will force the market to stop valuing them as a utility and start valuing them as a financial platform.

The Signal: Telcos that stayed “dumb pipes” are tied to traditional margins. Telcos that embedded fintech created a second, superior engine of growth. In fact, two of the biggest African fintech unicorns are silently sitting within MTN and Airtel. Furthermore as banks in South Africa and other parts are starting to acquire fintech startups, we should expect in the years to come more M&A with the tech space driven by the telcos. MTN was recently loud and clear about this objective.

5. The Subsidiary Spin-Off Flex

The same MTN has been on the JSE since 1995. But the real alpha was found by spinning out the subsidiaries.

When MTN Nigeria (2019) and MTN Ghana (2018) listed locally, they exploded (+490% and +729%). The underlying business didn’t change, but the optics did. Local markets don’t apply conglomerate discounts. They price these assets for what they are: dominant, unshakeable national monopolies.

IN THE VALLEY OPINION:

The Compounding is Deafening

The noteworthy observations are as follow:

• All of these 15 players (except for two tower businesses) have experienced phenomenal compounding success as they have listed on exchanges of the Region.
• The local exchanges have all rewarded them handsomely except for the one case of Maroc Telecom.
• As for Helios Towers and IHS who decided to list respectively in London and New York, it’s a mixed bag. Helios has been rocking while IHS hasn’t. Thankfully MTN (again) is coming to save the day for IHS.

While the media narrative these days focuses mostly on AI, crypto, and VR, the numbers showing “stamina and endurance” are steel, spectrum, and demographics. Every digital transaction depends on the infrastructure these companies are building.

In terms of listing, just like we discovered with tech companies last week, the local choice remains overall the winning ticket.

Connectivity is not a short-cycle trade. It is a multi-decade asset class tied to population growth and the unstoppable digitization of the Region.

Telecom networks operate without making noise in the background. But the sound of the cash compounding rarely does.

For many of these players, it’s still Day Zero, and they can still shape shift.