MTN Group Limited (JSE:MTN) CEO Ralph Mupita has shut down speculation that the mobile provider is in talks to acquire smaller rival Telkom SA SOC Ltd. (JSE:TKG). Last week, Bloomberg reported that SA's second-largest mobile provider was trying to revive takeover talks after failing to make such a deal happen in 2022. During a media event on 5 September 2025, Mupita rejected the claim, saying no such talks were taking place.
"There are no talks with Telkom. There are no advisers that have been engaged. We did discuss this sometime in the past [but] there are no active discussions," he said.
That said, it makes sense why speculation has been rife, because industry players understand that MTN has only two options available to compete effectively in home and fixed internet provisioning: partnership and acquisition. Mupita reiterated that MTN sees the third option "building its own fibre network" as unviable in SA, despite its ambitions to be a big player in the market. "Building is completely off the table.
SA has built enough fibre and it would be a poor allocation of capital for us to build fibre on our own," he said. MTN, which made an estimated ZAR 30 billion bid to buy Telkom in July 2022, withdrew its offer after rival Rain made its own approach to merge with the fixed-line operator. It has been widely accepted that MTN was mainly interested in the deal for Telkom's large fibre trove housed in Openserve.
