Ask most South Africans about Cell C and you’ll often get a different version of the same answer. Yoh, they’re still around. Didn’t they almost go under a couple of times?
That’s fair enough and for most of the last decade that was an accurate description.
On Thursday, Cell C published its first full year of results as a listed company, covering the twelve months to 31 May 2026, and the numbers do not look like a company on life support anymore.
Roughly 1.3 million subscribers added year-on-year, up 19%. Group revenue of R12.641 billion. Net debt cut by 64%, from R5.691 billion down to R2.020 billion. Net debt to EBITDA improving from 4.29 times to 1.56 times.
But before we get carried away, there is a number that needs unpacking.
There are two EBITDA numbers and only one of them is real
Cell C reported EBITDA of R5.509 billion.
That figure includes one-off gains from the restructuring transaction, which is a polite way of saying it includes accounting profit from fixing the balance sheet rather than money made by selling airtime.
Strip those out and adjusted EBITDA is R2.381 billion.
To Cell C’s credit, it says so plainly in the release rather than burying it in a footnote, which is not always how these things go. But you can safely expect the bigger number to do the rounds on LinkedIn this week without the asterisk attached.
There is a similar footnote worth knowing about the earnings per share. Headline earnings per share of 2,338 cents sounds enormous until you notice it is calculated on 177 million weighted average shares while 340 million shares are actually in issue, because the listing and restructure happened partway through the year. The per-share numbers will look very different next year on a full share count.
No dividend was declared, in line with what the board said at the time of the IPO.
Cell C’s real business is being everyone else’s network
Here is the part that most coverage will underplay.
Cell C’s own customer base is 8.884 million. Sitting alongside that, and deliberately excluded from the figure, are another 5.713 million MVNO subscribers running on its network.
MVNO stands for mobile virtual network operator, which is the industry’s clunky name for a brand that sells you a SIM without owning a single tower. Capitec Connect. FNB Connect. Shoprite K’nect. Mr Price Mobile. Me&You. All of them run on Cell C.
Cell C reckons it holds between 80% and 85% of the South African MVNO market, and it added 1.2 million of those customers in the past year alone. Wholesale service revenue grew about 20% to R1.760 billion.
So the network that supposedly lost the retail war has become the plumbing behind the brands that won it. Capitec Connect alone reported 1.5 million active clients in its own results earlier this year, with net income contribution more than doubling to R442 million, and every one of those SIMs is a Cell C SIM with different branding.
There is a decent chance you have been a Cell C customer for years without ever thinking of yourself as one.
The asset-light model is the whole strategy
Cash capex for the year was R810 million, with total additions to property, plant and equipment and intangibles of R1.147 billion. Guidance for FY27 sits between R750 million and R850 million.
For context, Vodacom and MTN spend several billion rand a year each on their South African networks. Cell C is running a national mobile business on roughly a tenth of that.
It can do this because it largely stopped building its own radio network and now rides on other operators’ infrastructure through MOCN and roaming agreements. Which is also worth remembering when you read the network quality claims in this release.
Cell C cites an OpenSignal assessment ranking it joint first nationally for reliability and video experience, and the highest network quality net sentiment in the sector per PwC and DataEQ. Both are legitimate results and both are also, in part, a measurement of somebody else’s towers, and the OpenSignal report referenced dates back to August 2025.
That is not a knock on the strategy. Not owning the towers is precisely how you cut net debt by 64% in a year. It just means “best network” here means something slightly different from what it means when Vodacom says it.
Data is up 47%, voice is dying, exactly as expected
Data traffic grew 47% year-on-year, outpacing customer growth. Voice traffic declined 4%.
Nothing surprising there, and it is the same pattern across every South African operator. You are not calling people. You are sending voice notes, which are data, on WhatsApp, which is data, over a connection you are paying for by the gigabyte.
The other operational numbers are more interesting for existing customers. Net Promoter Score moved from 19 to 33. App users more than doubled and app revenue grew 41%. Employee NPS went from minus 3 to plus 34, which for a company that spent years in restructuring purgatory is a genuinely significant swing.
44 stores were refreshed in the year, taking the total to 79 of 103. Cell C Business launched in January 2026 aiming at SMEs, and international roaming now covers 120 operators.
Why any of this should matter to you
If you are on Vodacom or MTN and have no intention of moving, this still affects you, for two reasons.
The first is competitive. A financially stable Cell C is the only reason the MVNO market exists at the scale it does, and the MVNO market is where the aggressive pricing lives. Shoprite K’nect was recently found to have the cheapest 5GB monthly bundle in the country at R89. Capitec built a business on data that does not expire. None of those products exist if the network hosting them is fighting for survival.
The second is that pressure works downward. Every time an MVNO undercuts the big two, the big two eventually respond, slowly and grudgingly, the way they did after the Competition Commission’s data market inquiry.
And if you are on one of those MVNO SIMs already, the balance sheet news is your news too. Your provider does not own a network. It rents one. The health of the landlord matters.
What to watch from here
Cell C guides to upper single digit revenue growth off an adjusted FY26 base of R13.599 billion, which restates the year to include a full twelve months of the CEC business it reacquired during the period.
Some things worth keeping an eye on.
Whether MTN keeps eating into the MVNO hosting business, because it is now the second largest host in the country and that 80% to 85% share is the single most valuable thing Cell C owns.
Whether adjusted EBITDA grows next year without one-off gains propping up the headline, which is the honest test of the turnaround.
And whether Cell C shows up on zero-rating. It is one of the operators carrying a licence obligation to make public benefit content data-free by 15 January 2027, an obligation that so far only fifteen organisations across the major networks have benefited from. A company that has spent a year rebuilding public trust has an unusually cheap opportunity sitting right there.
The turnaround looks real. FY27 is where we find out whether it was a rescue or a business.
