A new data by the Nigeria Communications Commission revealed that the number of active mobile subscriptions across the MTN, Globacom, Airtel, and 9mobile increased to 199.5 million in March 2022.
The data, which is the highest number of subscriptions recorded by the operators since January 2021, was revealed on the NCC’s website on Friday.
The data revealed that the four operators’ customer base grew by 1.4 million subscriptions in March, after recording a total of 198.1 million in February 2022.
According to the NCC statistics, MTN’s customer database rose by 243,879 new subscriptions. It moved from 74.9 million in February to 75.2 million in March.
MTN which is the largest operator by subscriber number is followed by Globacom whose database increased by 894, 565 new subscriptions to 55.8 million in March.
While Airtel’s subscription database stands at subscriptions to 55.3 million after it grew by 366,422 in March, 9mobile’s database dropped by 71,992 to 12.7 million.
Meanwhile, Gadgets Africa had reported on March 16 that MTN Nigeria Communications Plc and Airtel Nigeria’s financial statements revealed that telecommunication subscribers in Nigeria spent at least N615.08bn on calls and data in the first quarter of 2022.
This is a 23.09 per cent increase from the N499.66bn they made in the corresponding period of 2021.
According to the NCC, a total of 150,825,830,687.40 minutes of calls were made in 2020 in its industry statistics report for 2020.
Of this, a total of 145,420,101,695 calls (96.42 per cent) were made from both MTN and Airtel lines, with calls from MTN lines totalling 103,531,547,686 minutes and Airtel totalling 41,888,554,009 minutes.
In Q1 2022, MTN Nigeria made N258.77bn from calls and N162.73bn from data. In the corresponding period of 2021, the company made N244.62bn from calls and N105.69bn from data.
In Q1 2022, Airtel made N112.29bn ($268m) from calls and N81.29bn ($194m) from data. It made N91.44bn ($240m) from calls and N57.91bn ($152m) in the corresponding period of 2021.
