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Ethiopia’s leading telco Ethio Telecom capped its three-year LEAD Growth Strategy with all-time high revenues and continued expansion across digital and network infrastructure, reinforcing its dominance in Ethiopia’s liberalizing telecoms sector.
- •The state-owned operator reported annual revenue of 162 billion Birr ($2.6 billion), up 72.9% year-on-year, while EBITDA jumped 84% to 76 billion Birr.
- •The company nearly doubled revenue and profit margins since the LEAD strategy began in 2022, despite ongoing currency and regulatory challenges.
- •Total subscribers rose to 83.2 million, a 6.2% increase over the year and nearly 25% higher than three years ago.
Mobile voice users reached 80.3 million (+24.5%), while mobile data and internet users grew to 46.6 million (+82%). The fixed broadband base expanded 67% to 847,100, even as legacy fixed-line usage declined.
Smartphone penetration reached 41% of the customer base, supporting a 10-point rise in teledensity to 73.7%. Telebirr, the company’s mobile money service, accelerated to 54.8 million users, up 15% in the year, processing 2.38 trillion Birr in digital transactions.
Network Expansion and Digital Upgrades
The year saw one of Africa’s most aggressive network buildouts: Ethio Telecom added 1,683 mobile sites, nearly half in rural areas. 4G coverage surged from 37.5% to 70.8% of the population, with 5G extended to 26 cities. Overall mobile coverage now reaches 99.4% of Ethiopians and 86.5% of the country’s landmass.
The telco’s backbone fiber capacity grew to 22,673 kilometers. Major upgrades to data centers and cloud capacity underpinned launches of 365 new or improved products and supported public and private sector digitization efforts.
Telebirr’s transaction values up more than 90-fold in three years. The mobile money platform disbursed 13.2 billion Birr in micro-loans to nearly 7 million customers, and mobilized over 11 billion Birr in savings.
Ethio Telecom invested 1.5 billion Birr in social projects over the strategy period, including education, healthcare, and green initiatives, and facilitated more than 1 million job or income opportunities nationwide. The company also advanced gender diversity, raising the share of women in director roles from 4% to 13%.
The performance comes amid foreign exchange shortages, infrastructure vandalism, and regulatory price caps on core mobile products. Ethio Telecom defended its market share against new entrant Safaricom Ethiopia, which launched in 2022 but did not report head-to-head competitive metrics.