🟥 MTS posts double-digit financial growth and expands media vertical
MTS Group has announced its unaudited financial and operating results for the first quarter of 2026. The company continues to demonstrate stable development across both its core infrastructure sectors and its primary ecosystem verticals, with the telecommunications sector and media business serving as the key growth drivers.
Key Financial Results
- Group Revenue: Increased by 14.7% year-on-year, reaching 201.3 billion rubles.
- OIBDA: Demonstrated strong upward momentum, rising 18.0% year-on-year to 74.7 billion rubles, driven by high margins within telecom services.
- Net Profit: Skyrocketed by 46.4% year-on-year to 7.2 billion rubles.
- Debt Load: Recorded at its lowest level since 2021, with the net debt-to-LTM OIBDA ratio decreasing to 1.6 due to the systematic optimization of the company’s liability portfolio.
Media Business: Expansion and Audience Growth
The media vertical and FunTech segments posted robust operating results for the reporting period, cementing their status as a primary vector for non-telecom growth.
- ON Media Holding Revenue: Increased by 3.8% year-on-year to 7.0 billion rubles. The main contributor to this growth was the scaling of TV and OTT services.
- Kion Online Cinema: The subscriber base expanded by 9.1% compared to the same period last year, reaching 10.9 million users.
- Total MTS Pay-TV Subscribers: Including cable, satellite broadcasting, IPTV, and OTT, the total subscriber base increased by 9.8% year-on-year to 16.3 million users.
Telecom and IT Segments: Stability and Innovation
Revenues in the telecommunications segment demonstrated a 14.7% increase, reaching 130.3 billion rubles. The most notable growth was recorded in the B2B/G sectors (+15.8% driven by digital services) and the inter-operator business (+33.7%). The total mobile subscriber base in Russia reached 83.8 million customers.
Within the IT segment, despite a planned correction in total revenue to 14 billion rubles (-5.1%), external revenue for the cloud provider MTS Web Services (MWS) surged by 46%. The company also expanded its solutions portfolio by introducing a modular data center platform and the intelligent assistant MWS Data Copilot.
The continuous development of communication infrastructure, combined with the commercial capitalization of its proprietary media platform and IT solutions, ensures the company’s long-term market resilience.
Source: MTS
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