Being locked into a mobile contract is just another one of those unwanted hassles for those of us with commitment phobia.

In South Africa, for obvious reasons, pre-paid remains a popular option. That being said, for the three-month period dating back from the end of September, MTN lost a total of 824 000 pre-paid customers.

Those numbers came to light when the company released its quarterly report earlier this week, which was something of a mixed bag.

These numbers via Business Insider:

Across all its markets, subscribers increased by 2.5 million to 225.4 million.

But while MTN saw strong subscriber and revenue growth from its markets outside of South Africa (revenue from Ghana and Nigeria grew by 23% and 17% respectively), the update confirms that the company is losing local prepaid customers at a rapid rate.

While the number of MTN contract subscribers increased by 120,000 to 5.7 million in this period, the mobile network lost 824,000 prepaid subscribers.

It now has 23.7 million pre-paid subscribers. The company lost a total of 1.5 million subscribers in South Africa in the year to September 2018…

MTN extracted more revenue out of its remaining prepaid customers, though. Revenue from its prepaid service rose R2.8 million to R77.5 million despite the fall in subscribers.

According to Ruhan du Plessis, a telecommunication analyst at Avior Capital Markets, the drop in pre-paid customers is down to increased competition.

Rain Mobile has recently entered the market, and their data offering compares very favourably to other mobile providers:

I don’t care if Telkom is handing out free GBs like it’s candy, I would never, ever dabble in their business.

It remains to be seen what MTN’s next quarterly results show, but given that they recently scrapped free Twitter in the final week of September, I would expect those numbers to continue to drop.

The anger is still raw – this tweet from September:

And this tweet from earlier this morning:

There’s a lotta pain behind those eyes, Hlaudi.

If you’re wondering why MTN would yank Free Twitter, knowing the backlash they would face, the company stated that “the demands on its network…had grown too great”, and the estimated 13 million customers making use of Free Twitter were consuming 1,9 million gigabytes of data per month.

I guess we’ll see if that was a good or bad business decision in the coming months.

[source:businsider]