Reporting a highly impressive operational performance on Wednesday, NTH South Africa revealed that it has witnessed a 15.4 percent increase in the number of its total subscribers; with the notable growth chiefly resulting from a 15 percent increase - to 20.9 million - in pre-paid subscriber figures.

About the reported increase in its total subscriber numbers, MTN South Africa said that the growth was largely an upshot of data services and competitive offerings, especially the MTN Mahala and MTN Zone offerings.

Fueled by the subscriber growth, along with a substantial growth in data (not including SMS) and airtime revenue, the total revenue figures of MTN South Africa witnessed a 7.1 percent increase, to R41.4 billion.

Drawing attention to MTN South Africa commendable growth in data revenue, the group's CEO Karel Pienaar said that data revenue figures saw a noteworthy 37.6 percent increase to R6.4 billion; thereby accounting for 15.5 percent of the group's total revenue, excluding SMS.

Referring to MTN South Africa's pre-paid segment, Pienaar said that the group has "always been particularly good at finding the gems and finding elasticity.. you can see our minutes have increased;" and added: "We have been giving our customers a lot more for free. it just generates more traffic, so you end up with a lot more volume."