• Airtel Zambia's revenue grew 26% to ZMW8.95 billion, driven by a 12% increase in subscribers to 12.45 million and strong data services and mobile money growth
• The company invested heavily in network expansion, deploying 406 new sites and increasing property, plant, and equipment by ZMW2.66 billion to ZMW6.38 billion
• Airtel Zambia's operating profit surged 36% to ZMW3.59 billion, with profit after tax rising 41% to ZMW1.76 billion, demonstrating strong financial performance

Harare- Airtel Networks Zambia, the country's largest mobile operator by revenue and subscriber base’s full year results for 2025 placed it firmly in the upper tier of sub-Saharan African telecommunications performers, with total revenue grew 26% to ZMW8.95 billion (approximately USD353 million), operating profit surging 36% to ZMW3.59 billion (USD141 million), and profit after tax climbing 41% from ZMW1.25 billion to ZMW1.76 billion (USD69.6 million) according to its latest financial results.

The customer base expanded 12% to 12.45 million subscribers, while, earnings per share rose from ZMW12.04 to ZMW16.95. These are the numbers of a market leader accelerating rather than consolidating, a company whose financial momentum is running ahead of the market growth rate and whose dominance appears to be deepening rather than plateauing.

Airtel Zambia spent 2025 making a capital bet of historic scale on its own network, and the outcome of that bet will define its competitive position for the decade ahead.

The balance sheet transformation between December 2024 and December 2025 is striking. Property, plant and equipment grew from ZMW3.72 billion to ZMW6.38 billion, a ZMW2.66 billion (USD105 million) increase in a single year that represents the largest network capital deployment in the company's operating history in Zambia.

In December 2025, Airtel Zambia launched a USD107 million nationwide network expansion programme, including the deployment of 406 additional network sites, following regulatory pressure over declining service quality and warnings from Zambia's telecommunications regulator.

The balance sheet confirms that programme was not merely announced,  it was executed, with the capital already deployed and capitalised onto the asset base. Total assets grew from ZMW5.64 billion to ZMW8.95 billion, a 59% increase driven almost entirely by this network infrastructure build.

This is not incremental maintenance investment, but  a structural enlargement of the company's physical network footprint, funded by a combination of operating cash flows and non-current liabilities that grew from ZMW1.18 billion to ZMW5.15 billion over the same period, reflecting the long-term financing structure that underpins an infrastructure build of this scale.

Net cash generated from operations reached ZMW2.60 billion (USD102 million) in 2025, a number that confirms the business is generating sufficient internal cash to service the expansion and sustain core operations without existential reliance on external funding. Net cash utilised in investing activities was ZMW817 million (USD32 million), and financing activities consumed a further ZMW1.47 billion (USD58 million), the latter largely reflecting dividend payments to the parent Airtel Africa group.

The closing cash position moved from negative ZMW712 million to negative ZMW402 million, an improvement in the overdraft position that, combined with the operating cash generation, suggests the business's liquidity is strengthening even as it deploys capital aggressively.

The PwC Zambia Telecommunications Report 2025 indicated that Airtel held a 48% market share by revenue at the end of 2024, compared to 28% for MTN and 23% for Zamtel, with Airtel reporting approximately 12.3 million subscribers against MTN's 6.7 million as of September 2025.

Those figures represent a market share gap of roughly 20 percentage points between the two commercial operators, a dominance that is remarkable in a market that has seen sustained competitive pressure from a well-capitalised rival. MTN Zambia launched commercial 5G in late 2022, becoming the first operator in the country to do so, while Airtel followed with its own 5G launch in March 2025, intensifying competition for high-value users in urban centres.

The sequencing matters. MTN had a roughly two-and-a-half year head start on 5G, yet Airtel's subscriber and revenue leadership has not been eroded. The explanation lies in the depth of Airtel's 4G network coverage in peri-urban and rural areas where the mass of Zambia's population lives, and in the strength of Airtel Money as a mobile financial services platform that anchors customers to the ecosystem beyond the basic connectivity proposition.

The Zambian telecommunications market is estimated at USD600 million in 2025 and is projected to reach USD830 million by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 6.64%, with subscriber volumes expected to grow from 22.85 million to 27.57 million over the same period.

Against that market backdrop, Airtel's 26% revenue growth is running at four times the market's structural growth rate, which implies the company is not merely growing with the market , it is taking share from competitors and extracting more revenue per subscriber through data services, mobile money, and enterprise products.

The 12% customer growth to 12.45 million, while strong in absolute terms, is actually the slower of the two headline metrics, which tells that revenue per customer is rising. That Average Revenue Per User expansion is the most important single indicator of a maturing telecommunications business, and it is what differentiates a growth story from a pure volume story.

The technology trajectory of the Zambian market deserves attention in any reading of Airtel's results. With only 1.3% of Zambia's 3,568 towers currently hosting 5G equipment, the expansion runway for new sites and colocation leases is significant, with densification targeted at 65% population coverage in Lusaka, Kitwe, and Ndola.

Airtel's 406-site expansion, which aims to increase population coverage from 91.6% to 93% by 2026 with longer-term ambitions of reaching 95% to 96% within two years, positions the company to serve the enterprise and industrial segments where data-intensive applications, IoT in mining, telemedicine, digital financial services , are creating demand for network capacity that basic 4G cannot reliably support.

The mining sector's digitalisation agenda, which includes real-time equipment diagnostics, environmental compliance monitoring, and logistics optimisation across Zambia's Copperbelt, represents a high-value enterprise segment that both Airtel and MTN are targeting with managed connectivity products.

Airtel's network scale advantage gives it the coverage depth to serve mine sites that are geographically remote from urban centres, which is a competitive differentiator that cannot easily be replicated by a competitor starting from a smaller tower footprint.

Airtel Africa signed a partnership with SpaceX to launch Starlink Direct-to-Cell satellite connectivity starting in 2026 , a development that, if executed in Zambia, would extend Airtel's addressable market to the approximately 7% of the population currently beyond terrestrial network reach.

The satellite-to-cellular integration technology effectively turns any Airtel-compatible handset into a device that can connect via Starlink satellites without additional hardware, removing the infrastructure economics constraint that has historically made rural connectivity commercially unviable for terrestrial operators. For a country where agriculture and smallholder farming remain major economic activities in areas far from the existing tower grid, this technology pathway could open a material new revenue segment within Airtel's existing subscriber relationships.

The equity structure reveals one aspect of the results that warrants scrutiny. Total equity at year end was ZMW779 million (USD30.7 million) against total assets of ZMW8.95 billion (USD353 million),  an equity-to-assets ratio of approximately 8.7%, which is thin for a capital-intensive infrastructure business of this scale.

The retained earnings position of ZMW753 million reflects the cumulative effect of dividend payments back to the Airtel Africa parent, which appear to have consumed the majority of the year's profit given that retained earnings grew by only ZMW215 million despite a ZMW1.76 billion profit after tax. The balance of the profit was distributed upward to the group.

This is a standard feature of subsidiary-parent capital structures in the telecommunications industry, operating subsidiaries generate cash and return it to the group holding company, which allocates it across the portfolio according to strategic priorities , but it does mean that Airtel Zambia's standalone balance sheet is considerably more leveraged than its income statement would suggest to a reader who stopped at the profit line.

The results as a whole confirm that Airtel Networks Zambia is in the strongest competitive and financial position it has occupied in its 27-year operating history in the country. The revenue growth is real, the operating leverage is improving, the customer base is the largest it has ever been, and the network investment programme underway is the largest in the company's history.

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