MTN Group Chief Executive Officer Ralph Mupita has said that device affordability challenges will not deter the telecom group’s investment drive, identifying fibre-to-the-home as the company’s next major service frontier over the next five to ten years.

Mupita made the remarks during a conversation with journalists and fellows of the MTN Media Innovation Programme in Lagos. His comments come against the backdrop of a global decline in smartphone shipments: a recent IDC report indicates that smartphone sales fell 22% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2026.

Rising costs across the device supply chain have weighed on the mobile sector. The cost of storage has climbed over the past year, driven by rising demand from the AI industry, squeezing profitability and pushing chipmaking companies to raise prices, cut back specifications and discard budget-focused, entry-level models. Prices of existing smartphone models have risen almost 15% globally in 2026, while newly launched models are roughly 25% more expensive than last year. For mobile operators such as MTN, those figures matter directly: handsets are the gateway through which customers reach the data services that drive network usage.

“The real big difficulty today is that the cost of devices has gone up by at least 80%,” Mupita said.

The affordability challenge is not new for the group. In October last year, MTN Chairman Mcebisi Jonas hinted that MTN plans to invest in 5G-enabled phone acquisitions to boost penetration, particularly in Nigeria and Ghana. “To address this challenge, we will have to invest in landing network-appropriate devices at an affordable price range and compatible with country-specific regulations,” he said at the time.

Mupita acknowledged that rising prices have made delivering on that promise increasingly difficult: “So, we thought we could distribute devices to our customers at a $50 price point three years ago. Today, the same devices cost between $80 and $100. And that has potentially hampered the extent of our coverage.”

Even so, he maintained that the company remains committed to its investment plan to serve its 307.2 million users in line with its Ambition 2030 strategic plan, which includes investment in connectivity, fintech and digital infrastructure.

In August, MTN Nigeria Chief Financial Officer Modupe Kadri highlighted how 76% of MTN Nigeria’s revenue flows back into the Nigerian economy in the form of investment and dividends to shareholders. In 2025, the company spent ₦620.5 billion on capital projects, with total capex growing to ₦1.6 trillion over the last 18 months.

Mupita framed the case for further investment around surging data demand:

“Every year, the average Nigerian spends 30% more on data consumption. So, we need to create the capacity to take on more and enable our customers to do more. There is a tremendous amount of investment needed over the next five to 10 years to build the digital infrastructure, to fiberise networks, to create the capacity to take on more of the so-called workloads.”

“So there is a cost of production, and we’re always wanting to make sure that we are driven also by customers’ affordability. And between the two, we’ll try and make it work. So we in Africa are, you know, the average MTN customer spends two to $3 per month on communication services.”

That build-out aligns with the fibre-to-the-home frontier Mupita identified as MTN’s next major service focus, extending the group’s infrastructure push beyond mobile networks alone.

The scale of the affordability problem is significant in context. A September 2026 GSMA report indicates that about 3 in 10 Nigerians actively use the internet, with a usage gap of 53% and a coverage gap of 11% as of 2025. Interventions that cut both gaps in half could bring 75 million Nigerians online.

Mupita listed device financing, purchase subsidies and engagement with manufacturers as ways to address the affordability problem. “There are ongoing initiatives with the World Bank and other institutions to bring smart smartphones at lower costs and remove tariffs and import duties,” he said. Because tariffs and import duties are set at government level, movement on that front would depend on policy decisions rather than operators alone.

Ultimately, he insisted that companies such as MTN must balance network investment costs—including spectrum, imported equipment and capacity—with customer affordability and sustainable returns for shareholders.

MTN’s role in AI language models and digital sovereignty

Mupita also highlighted the importance of access to internet-enabled devices for AI accessibility and adoption. He lamented the extent of African-language representation in open-weight models and pointed to MTN’s participation in industry efforts to support voice-centric workloads. Device affordability ties into that goal, since internet-enabled handsets are the entry point for reaching AI services.

“The 2,000 African languages, and you know, African languages on the internet are a very small single-digit percentage. So, to some extent, we are almost excluded,” he said. “But, we mustn’t accept that as our lived reality. We need to bring agency to ingest our African languages into these AI models (Hausa, Yoruba, Shona, Swahili), so that we don’t get left behind.”

He described a likely hybrid model to power this shift, in which sensitive workloads would be hosted in-country while less sensitive workloads use the public cloud.

“We will be working with the GSMA to ensure African languages are included, particularly at the level of annotation. It’s not a job that only one company can do. So we are looking at a partnership model with other operators across the continent, whether it’s Apple, Orange or Broadcom, etc.,” he said.

Mupita closed by calling for an African Union-level harmonisation of data privacy laws, data transport and cross-border e-commerce frameworks for the continent. Whether that harmonisation call, the GSMA annotation partnership and the World Bank-linked device initiatives move from commitment to implementation is the concrete marker to watch as the agenda advances.