Source FY2025 audited financial statements, restated in the modelWorkings data appendixUpdated 24 September 2026
The read
This is the most improved company in Saudi telecom. In FY2018 Mobily earned materially less on its capital than that capital cost. In FY2025 it earned 13.8% against a cost of 11.2%, a spread of +2.6pt. It first cleared the hurdle in FY2021 and has stayed above it every year since, the longest unbroken run of value creation in the industry after the incumbent's.
The recovery is visible in margin rather than in scale. EBITDA margin of 39.1% is the best in the industry, gross margin 54.7%, and revenue still grew +7.9%, the fastest of the three. Growing faster than the incumbent while steadily closing the gap on returns is not what a challenger in a saturated three-operator market is supposed to be able to do.
It is also the more conservative distributor. Payout of 55.5% of net profit leaves room to keep funding the network from earnings rather than from the balance sheet, with debt to equity at 0.28x and interest covered 11.4x over. The open question is durability: a spread built on a margin recovery is only as good as the margin.
The bet it made
Mobily bought capacity. It has the lowest national 5G availability of the three, and that is deliberate. It chose where to be rather than how much to cover, and where it chose is where the revenue lives: across 61 cities it covers 98%. It holds the most capacity spectrum, which is what moves large volumes of data in dense places.
Its infrastructure spending follows the same logic outward. Mobily is directing capital at international transit, competing on geography rather than on domestic scale it cannot win. It is the last operator still consolidating its own towers, and is in early talks to sell.
| 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| stc | 18.8% | 20.9% | 18.4% | 13.0% | 11.8% | 13.6% | 15.7% | 15.2% |
| Mobily | 15.1% | 15.6% | 24.5% | 15.0% | 15.5% | 12.1% | 14.7% | 16.4% |
| Zain KSA | 20.2% | 24.3% | 23.1% | 13.8% | 14.8% | 15.4% | 6.8% | 4.5% |
Where the money comes from
Retail
A challenger has one lever and Mobily is pulling it. The subscriber base grew 17.4%, faster than either rival, but revenue grew only 6.7%, and the gap is the whole story: 85% of those subscribers are prepaid. Prepaid is the cheapest, least loyal, easiest-to-switch end of the market.
Enterprise
Being the credible second source is structurally valuable. Large institutions do not want single-vendor dependency and giga-projects want redundancy, so somebody has to be the answer to "who else is there?". Mobily is, and the line grew 7.7% in 2025.
Wholesale
Mobily is attacking precisely the business stc is losing. Its wholesale revenue is already a larger share of its total than stc's is of stc's, and it is still growing.
What it does with the money
Where stc is buying into a data-center joint venture, Mobily is building its own. It is the same instinct visible everywhere else in its strategy: own the asset in the places you have chosen to compete, rather than rent breadth you cannot afford.
What comes back to shareholders
Of what it earned in FY2025, Mobily declared SAR 2.51 a share, 55.5% of net profit, against free cash flow of SAR 3.4B. Every riyal a telecom earns arrives at the same fork: back into the network, or out to shareholders. That ratio is the answer this one gave.
In context
This company only means something next to the other two and against the economics of the industry they share.
Read the industry piece See it against the others