Nigeria’s cellular subscription base elevated to 157.3 million in October 2024 from 154.6 million in September, signaling the start of restoration after months of decline.
The expansion was pushed by two community operators, MTN, and Airtel, that recorded a rise of their subscriber base within the month beneath evaluate.
This adopted an intensive audit performed by the Nigerian Communications Fee (NCC), and the implementation of the NIN-Sim linkage train, which plunged the nation’s subscriptions database by 64.3 million traces between March and September.
With the expansion in actively related traces recorded by the operators, the nation’s teledensity, which measures the variety of lively phone connections per 100 inhabitants residing inside an space, additionally rose to 72.7% from 71.46% recorded in September.
In line with NCC, the teledensity is calculated primarily based on a inhabitants estimate of 216 million.
How the operators fared
The NCC’s statistics present that MTN, which is the biggest operator by subscriber quantity, boosted the full business database with a 2.2 million enhance in its subscriptions. This introduced its whole lively subscriptions to 80.3 million from 78 million it recorded in September 2024.
- With this, MTN now controls 51.09% of Nigeria’s cellular market.
- Airtel, the second-largest operator, additionally gained 697,430 new subscriptions in October, which pushed its lively database to 54.4 million from 53.7 million recorded within the earlier month. The telco trails MTN with 31.61% of the market share.
- Nevertheless, Globacom, which misplaced over 19 million subscriptions to the final audit and NIN-SIM linkage train nonetheless recorded a 44,635 decline in subscriptions for October.
- Globacom, in third place, accounts for 12.15% of the market share with 19.1 million whole lively subscriptions on the finish of October.
- Equally, 9mobile, which has seen a big decline in its customer base through the years additional misplaced 245,263 subscriptions in October, bringing its database down to three.3 million, amounting to 2.15% of the market share.
What it is best to know
Except for the NIN-SIM linkage train which ensured that each one SIMs not linked with the customers’ NIN had been disconnected from the networks, the NCC stated it additionally carried out an audit on the telco’s databases, which led to the massive decline within the nation’s subscription quantity from 219 million in March this 12 months to 154 million in September.
Whereas noting that the audit aimed to eradicate inactive and improperly registered traces, the NCC within the course of, stated it found that one community operator had misclassified roughly 40 million inactive subscribers as lively.
These traces had generated no income for over 90 days, breaching the NCC’s tips for figuring out lively customers and distorting business knowledge.
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