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MTN South Africa is putting so many prepaid SIM cards into the market that the number starts to sound less like telecoms and more like confetti with a RICA form attached.
According to TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod, MTN South Africa chief executive Ferdi Moolman told a post-interim-results media conference on Tuesday that MTN alone puts about 90 million prepaid SIM cards into the local market every year.
South Africa has about 65 million people, children included. Moolman estimated the industry-wide figure at between 200 million and 300 million SIM cards a year.
“It just doesn’t make sense. This is huge. This is massive,” Moolman said.
The point, obviously, is not that South Africa has quietly produced a second and third population in the cellphone aisle at PEP. It is churn.
MTN Group chief executive Ralph Mupita described South Africa as a “multi-Sim market”, with customers holding three SIM cards and moving between networks recharge by recharge. In his telling, the customer gets an offer from provider A, then B, then C, and eventually returns to A when the deal looks better.
That is not just consumer opportunism. Mupita also pointed to the “customer value management” software each operator runs in the background to flag a subscriber who has gone quiet for a couple of weeks and push a fresh offer their way before a rival network gets there first.
So the networks complain about churn while also running machines that help manufacture it. Very elegant. Very South African.
The problem is that the churn does not stay inside a marketing dashboard. Moolman linked the flood of SIM cards to the quality of RICA registrations, and to account-hijacking syndicates that use badly registered or pre-registered cards to take over WhatsApp, Facebook and other accounts.
He told TechCentral that better know-your-customer checks would help reduce that fraud. The operators have since worked out a new sign-up framework between themselves, brokered through the industry body ACT and shaped in talks with the justice ministry, which oversees RICA.
MTN isn’t waiting for that framework to land. It has already put a ceiling of 10 SIMs on any one registration, and built in a rule that flips a card back to inactive if it goes 30 days without being used after signup. That second rule is aimed at pre-registered street SIMs, where the paperwork says one person and the handset says somebody else entirely.
There is a second money story sitting underneath the churn story.
Business Day’s Mudiwa Gavaza reports that MTN is reviving XtraTime, its airtime-advance product, after scaling it back to clean up the customer base. Airtime advance lets prepaid users borrow small amounts of airtime and repay when they next recharge.
MTN’s lending here used to run deep – Business Day put the monthly figure as high as R800 million at its peak – before roughly half the borrowers stopped paying it back and the company throttled the product to focus on customers more likely to settle up.
Moolman told investors MTN felt comfortable “to start pushing XtraTime into the market again”, but said it had to be done responsibly because the company could otherwise end up back in the same position, “penetrating too deep” and in the wrong part of the market.
The cleanup appears to be working: Business Day reports MTN South Africa’s in-month repayment rate has climbed from roughly 50% in October 2025 to about 70% today. MTN describes the result, in its own words as quoted by Business Day, as “materially lower outstanding balances and a stronger quality subscriber base” – and the monthly lending figure has settled at R400 million to R500 million, down from that earlier R800 million peak.
MTN’s official interim results also flagged recovery in South Africa’s prepaid business as one of the group’s priorities for the rest of 2026.
MTN is cleaning up prepaid, but South Africa’s networks built a bargain-hunting SIM-card carousel, then had to work out how much airtime to lend people while the carousel was still spinning.
[Sources: TechCentral & Business Day & MTN]
