This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday.

Airtel Africa is on course to become a $7 billion business by the end of its next financial year ending March 2027. Its latest earnings reveal the three growth engines that could get it there. 

The telecom operator reported $1.85 billion in revenue for the three months ended June 30, up 30.95% from a year earlier. If Airtel maintains that pace for the rest of its financial year, it is on course to generate about $7.4 billion in annualised revenue, above the $6.42 billion it reported for the year ended March 2026. 

But subscriber growth is not how Airtel will cross the $7 billion mark. Getting there will depend less on adding millions of new subscribers than on convincing the customers it already has to spend more. The company makes more money when its customers consume more data, use more financial services, and spend more time within Airtel’s ecosystem.

Airtel Africa’s recovery has also been years in the making. In March 2024, Airtel’s revenue fell 5.3% after Nigeria’s currency devaluation wiped out much of its reported earnings. By March 2025, that decline had almost disappeared. By March 2026, revenue had rebounded 29.46% as tariff increases, stronger customer spending, and a more stable naira restored growth.

Despite that momentum, annual revenue will still depend on exchange rates, seasonal spending patterns, and regulatory decisions. But the June quarter shows a company whose next billion dollars will increasingly come from deeper data consumption, expanding financial services, and Nigeria’s economic recovery. 

Data becomes Airtel’s biggest business

Data overtook voice as Airtel’s largest revenue source for the full year ended March 2026, reinforcing a structural shift that has been building across African telecom markets for years. For decades, operators grew by selling airtime. Today, they increasingly grow by keeping customers online longer.

Airtel generated $750 million from data during the quarter, while average data revenue per user rose 20.83% to $2.90. 

Voice revenue remained comparatively flat. The combination suggests Airtel is no longer relying primarily on subscriber additions to grow revenue. Existing customers are spending more, a more profitable form of growth because customer acquisition costs do not rise at the same pace as revenue.

Smartphone penetration across Airtel’s network increased to 51%, a level that begins to change the economics of a telecom network. 

At around half of the subscriber base, smartphones stop being merely communication devices and become gateways to higher-margin digital services. 

Every additional smartphone user typically consumes more data as video consumption accelerates and time online increases, and is more likely to adopt financial services, creating multiple revenue opportunities from the same customer. 

That explains why Airtel’s average monthly data consumption jumped from 7.8GB to 10.6GB  per customer within one year, driving a 56.3% increase in traffic across its network. 

For Airtel, every percentage-point increase in smartphone penetration no longer simply adds another internet user. It creates more opportunities to sell data, financial services and digital products to the same customer.

Nigeria illustrates this particularly well.

Internet consumption in the country grew 35.7% in 2025 to 13.25 million terabytes, while Airtel Nigeria’s smartphone customers now consume 14.9GB monthly compared to 11.8GB a year earlier. Nigerians are consuming significantly more data as the country’s smartphone market grew 8% year-on-year in Q1 2026. 

But this engine also faces its biggest constraint.

Higher global memory and component prices are expected to push smartphone prices higher across Africa this year.

“Pricing pressure also appears far from fully reflected at retail: with component and memory costs rising,” Manish Pravinkumar, Principal Analyst at Omdia, told TechCabal in June. “Nigeria could still see another 15% to 30% upward pricing adjustment through the remainder of the year, particularly in the mass market.”

Affordability of smartphones is essential in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the cost of smartphones as a proportion of monthly GDP per capita is 26%, compared to the average of 16% across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), according to GSMA, the global body for telecom operators. 

If smartphones become significantly more expensive, Airtel’s challenge changes. Instead of relying on millions of first-time smartphone owners, it will increasingly have to convince its existing 87.3 million smartphone users to consume even more digital services.

But the growth opportunity continues to exist. 

According to McKinsey & Company, a leading global management consulting firm, the rapid increase in mobile data usage will continue to present a strong growth avenue for telcos. 

“With mobile data traffic per connection expected to quadruple in SSA by 2030, telcos can expand their offerings to support high-bandwidth applications such as video streaming, cloud gaming, and remote work solutions,” it said. 

Airtel Money generated $404 million during the quarter, representing almost 22% of group revenue. Annualised, the business is now running at more than $1.6 billion.

It processed more than $245 billion in annualised total processed value (TPV), up 51.5%, across its 56.5 million customers.

The telecom operator attributes this growth to the strengthening of its distribution network, as the total processed value per customer rose 13% to $371 per customer per month.

Airtel Money’s numbers suggest the business has outgrown its original role as a telecom value-added service. It is increasingly resembling a standalone financial platform capable of processing as much as Africa’s largest fintechs.

In 2025, Nigerian fintech unicorn Moniepoint processed ₦412 trillion ($294.03 billion). Mobile money now contributes a larger share of revenue and profit to the group than it did in 2019.  The sector itself is currently worth $1.4 trillion on the continent.

Almost half of the world’s total mobile money subscribers are on the continent, and according to McKinsey, African telcos have a significant opportunity to expand fintech solutions, including cross-border payments, microloans, and savings products.

A subscriber who only buys airtime can easily switch networks. A customer who receives a salary through Airtel Money, pays merchants, sends remittances, repays loans, and stores value inside the platform has far deeper ties to Airtel’s ecosystem.

Every financial transaction strengthens that relationship. These metrics are typically associated with large payments businesses rather than telecom subsidiaries. Payments businesses typically attract higher valuation multiples, reflecting faster growth, recurring transaction revenue and greater room to expand into lending, savings and merchant services. Airtel’s planned London listing is therefore as much about unlocking valuation as it is about raising capital.

Yet Nigeria may also prove Airtel Money’s hardest test. Unlike East Africa, where telecom-led mobile money matured with relatively limited competition, Nigeria already has deeply entrenched fintech players such as OPay and Moniepoint. 

East Africa generated 73.52% of Airtel Money’s quarterly revenue. Francophone Africa contributed 25.25%. Nigeria accounted for just 1.24%.

Airtel’s ability to scale SmartCash will determine whether mobile money becomes the group’s next billion-dollar growth engine or remains heavily concentrated in East Africa. 

Regardless of what happens in Nigeria, Airtel Money’s importance extends beyond today’s revenue contribution as it shifts Airtel away from being solely a connectivity provider toward becoming part of Africa’s growing financial infrastructure.

Nigeria is no longer Airtel’s biggest risk 

For much of the past three years, Nigeria was both Airtel’s biggest opportunity and its biggest accounting headache.

The 2023 naira devaluation and the Malawian kwacha devaluation of November 2023 triggered a $549 million exceptional foreign exchange loss, contributing to an $89 million loss after tax for the year ended March 2024 for Airtel Africa. Airtel Nigeria’s revenue fell 29.37%, dragging down group performance.

Airtel Nigeria also lost its crown as the group’s highest contributor to revenue.

Since then, tariff increases, stronger customer spending, and a more stable naira have transformed Nigeria from a source of earnings volatility into one of Airtel’s biggest growth drivers.

Group revenue grew by 29.47% in March 2026. Airtel Nigeria’s revenue increased by 52.92%.

During the June quarter, Nigerian revenue grew another 50%, while constant-currency revenue rose 29.8%, suggesting the gap between what Airtel earns locally and what it ultimately reports in dollars continues to narrow. Group revenue rose by 30.95%.

Airtel is not the only operator benefiting from Nigeria’s recovery. MTN Nigeria also returned to profitability in 2025 after posting heavy losses a year earlier, suggesting the turnaround reflects improving industry economics rather than company-specific execution alone. The stabilisation of the naira and approval of market-reflective tariffs have restored pricing power across the sector, allowing operators to translate rising data demand into earnings growth once again. 

Sunil Taldar, Airtel Africa chief executive officer, told investors on July 23 that its revenues are no longer benefiting from the Nigerian tariff adjustments. “Which underscores the breadth of growth opportunities across our markets,” he said, according to the uploaded transcript of the call obtained by TechCabal. 

This suggests that Airtel’s recent growth is becoming less dependent on regulatory price increases and more on structural drivers such as higher data consumption, smartphone adoption and financial services. While exchange-rate volatility remains a risk and consumer purchasing power is still fragile, Nigeria is once again amplifying Airtel’s earnings instead of diluting them. 

Airtel’s next billion dollars will not be won by connecting millions of Africans who have never owned a SIM card. It will be won by convincing the 189 million people already on its network across 14 African markets to watch one more video, make one more payment, save one more dollar and spend a little more of their digital lives inside Airtel’s ecosystem.

That is a fundamentally different telecom business from the one Airtel built over the past two decades. 

Whether it is durable will depend not only on smartphone affordability, regulation and competition, but on whether African consumers continue shifting more of their economic lives onto their phones.

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