This is Part 1 in a Four Part Series on Airtel’s FY 26 Results. Read Part 2: The Airtel Money IPO Story Is Bigger Than the Delay.
Airtel Africa has just posted the strongest set of full-year results in its history, with a quiet but historic milestone tucked inside: for the first time, the telco earned more from data than from voice calls.
The London and Lagos-listed group released its results for the year ended 31 March 2026 on Friday, 8 May 2026, and the numbers are sweeping. Group revenue climbed 29.5% in reported currency to $6.42 billion (roughly KES 828 billion). Profit after tax jumped 147% to $813 million (about KES 105 billion). The customer base grew by 17.4 million net new users to reach 183.5 million across the 14 sub-Saharan African markets where Airtel operates.
This is the year that everything Airtel Africa promised investors finally landed at once.
The data milestone that signals a structural shift
Buried in the segmental breakdown is the headline that matters most for the long term. Data revenue reached $2.53 billion in FY26, while voice revenue was $2.32 billion. A year earlier, voice was still ahead at $1.96 billion versus data’s $1.80 billion.
That flip is not a rounding-error event. It is a structural break. For most of mobile telephony’s history in Africa, the business has been built on prepaid voice minutes and SMS. Airtel’s FY26 numbers say that era is now genuinely over. Data is now 47.3% of mobile services revenue, up from 43% the year before. We are doing a fuller piece on what this shift means, but the headline is simple: the African mobile business now lives or dies on data, not calls.
Smartphone penetration across Airtel’s footprint reached 49.5%, up 4.7 percentage points. Data usage per customer climbed from 7.0 GB per month to 8.9 GB. Smartphone users now consume an average of 10.9 GB monthly.
Mobile money and the IPO that’s been delayed
Airtel Money, the group’s mobile financial services arm, also had a strong year. The customer base grew 21.3% to 54.1 million. Annualised total processed value crossed $215 billion in Q4’26, up 49% year-on-year. East Africa remains the workhorse, contributing 40.9 million of those mobile money customers.
But the planned Airtel Money IPO, originally targeted for the first half of 2026, has been pushed to the second half of the year. CEO Sunil Taldar cited “market conditions following recent geopolitical developments.” The Bloomberg-reported valuation of up to $10 billion, which would have made it one of Africa’s largest fintech listings ever, is now on hold. We have a separate piece coming on what the delay actually means.
The Kenya picture and East Africa’s quiet dominance
East Africa, which includes Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Rwanda, posted revenue of $3.02 billion. That is more than Nigeria’s $1.6 billion and Francophone Africa’s $1.79 billion combined. East Africa is now Airtel’s largest revenue region by a comfortable margin.
In Kenya specifically, Airtel continues to invest aggressively. The 44 MW Nxtra data centre at Tatu City, which we covered when it broke ground last September, is on track for a Q1 2027 launch. Group capex for FY27 is being raised to roughly $1.1 billion (around KES 142 billion), with home broadband and data centres specifically called out as priorities.
The diesel warning
The most important forward-looking signal in the entire results pack is buried in the CEO’s commentary. Taldar warned that the recent rise in energy costs from “ongoing geopolitical events” will “likely lead to increased cost inflation, resulting in EBITDA margin pressure in the near-term.”
Translated: the same Iran-Israel-US conflict that delayed the Airtel Money IPO is also raising the diesel bill at thousands of base stations across the continent. African telcos remain heavily exposed to diesel because grid power is unreliable across most of their markets. EBITDA margins hit an all-time high of 50.3% in Q4’26, up 295 basis points from a year earlier, but Airtel is openly signalling those gains will be hard to hold through FY27.
Shareholders are happy
The board recommended a final dividend of 4.26 cents per share, taking the full-year dividend to 7.1 cents per share, up 9.2%. A separate $100 million share buy-back programme also completed in March 2026, returning capital to shareholders alongside the dividend. Leverage improved to 1.8x from 2.3x.
For now, FY26 stands as Airtel Africa’s strongest year on record. Whether FY27 can hold the line depends on factors that have very little to do with the telco itself.
