MTN Nigeria Communications Plc has revealed plans to issue up to N50bn Series 11 and 12 commercial paper notes under the company’s N250bn commercial paper issuance.
This was disclosed in a corporate notice filed with the Nigerian Exchange Limited on Monday and signed by the Company Secretary, Uto Ukpanah.
In late 2023, MTN Nigeria revealed that it raised N72.1bn in the series 10 commercial paper issuance under the N250bn commercial paper issuance programme, recording a 149 per cent subscription rate.
The 266-day commercial paper was issued at a yield of 16 per cent.
In the fresh notice, the company said, “Issuance is part of the company’s strategy to diversify its financing options, with the funds being deployed towards short-term working capital requirements.”
Meanwhile, MTN Nigeria reported a N1.9bn loss in the first nine months of 2024, attributing it to the continuous devaluation of the naira, rising energy costs, and the prevailing inflationary environment.
This was stated by the MTN Nigeria Chief Executive Officer, Karl Toriola, in comments on the company’s quarterly results filed with the Nigerian Exchange Limited on Thursday.
At the end of Q3 2024, MTN disclosed that its service revenue increased by 33.6 per cent to N2.4tn but earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation decreased by 5.3 per cent to N860.2bn, and loss after tax was N514.9bn.
Commenting on the financial performance, Toriola said, “In the first nine months of 2024, we sustained the growth in our underlying operating performance—underpinned by our resilient business model and operational agility—despite challenging conditions.”
Despite the topline growth, EBITDA remained under severe pressure primarily because of naira depreciation, exacerbated by higher energy costs and general inflation.
The introduction of value added tax on leases in September 2023 also affected the YoY EBITDA performance.
“The further depreciation of the naira arising from the revaluation of foreign currency-denominated obligations resulted in a loss after tax for the nine months of N514.9bn (2023: 15.0bn loss, restated). This resulted in negative retained earnings and shareholders’ equity of N723bn (December 2023: negative N208bn) and N573.6bn (December 2023: negative N40.8bn), respectively.
“Adjusting for the net forex losses, PAT would have been positive N118.5bn (down by 59.2 per cent). Further adjusting for the impact of forex in our opex, PAT would have been up by 13.3 per cent to N367.1bn. Despite the reported losses, we delivered a positive free cash flow of N536.8bn, up 21.9 per cent, helped by favourable working capital movements and lower capex in the period,” it was stated.