Key highlights
- Mobile subscriptions in Nigeria jumped to 226.8 million in February.
- The growth was driven by MTN which recorded 756,847 new subscriptions in the month.
- Glo and 9mobile also recorded an increase in their subscriptions in February, while Airtel’s database plunged.
Active subscriptions for telecom services across the networks of MTN, Globacom, Airtel, and 9mobile rose by 15% year on year to hit 226.8 million in February 2023. This is according to the latest industry statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
The data shows that the four mobile operators have added a total of 29 million subscriptions in the last year. As of February 2022, the total active subscriptions of the telcos stood at 197.7 million.
Compared with the January 2023 figure, the subscriptions on the networks rose by 0.42% in February as the operators recorded a total of 955,539 new subscriptions in the month.
Teledensity growth
With the growth recorded by the operators, the country’s teledensity, which measures the number of active telephone connections per 100 inhabitants living within an area, also jumped from 118.51% in January 2023 to 119.01% in February. According to NCC, the teledensity is calculated based on a population estimate of 190 million.
How the telcos fared
The NCC’s statistics show that MTN, which is the largest operator by subscriber number, largely drove the growth recorded in February as gained 756,847 new subscriptions in the month. This brought its total active customer database to 92.7 million from the 91.9 million it recorded in January 2023.
Glo also recorded 420,562 increase in subscriptions in the month. With this, the operator was able to displace Airtel as the second-largest operator by subscriber number in February 2023. The new activations on the network brought Glo’s total subscriptions to 60.7 million from 60.3 million recorded in January 2023.
Airtel, however, lost some subscriptions in the month as its database plunged by 263,627 in the month under review. The telco’s active subscriptions declined to 60.3 million from 60.5 million at the end of February from 60.5 million recorded in January this year.
9mobile recorded subscriptions increase in the month as its database grew by 41,757. This brought its total active subscriptions to 13.07 million from 13.03 million in January.
The optics
With the steady growth in subscriptions recorded in the last year, mobile network operators could be said to have fully recovered from the impact of the 2020 NIN-SIM policy, which led to a loss of over 20 million subscriptions across the platform.
Mobile subscriptions in the country had been growing steadily until the government introduced a policy that mandated every telecom subscriber to link their SIM with NIN starting from December 2020. As of November 2020, subscriptions across the networks stood at 207.5 million. However, it began to decline in December and plunged to 188.9 million in August 2021.
