Victor EzejaThere has been increase in voice and data usage as data from financial statements of two telecommunication giants, MTN Nigeria Communications Plc and Airtel Nigeria revealed that their subscribers spent about N615.08bn on that in the first quarter of 2022.
A look at the telecom subscribers expenditure profile for the two mobile operators indicated an increase of 23.09 per cent from the N499.66bn they made in the corresponding period of 2021.
According to Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) subscriber statistics data as at February 2022, Airtel had 55.4 million (27.81 per cent), MTN, 74.9 million (37.89 per cent), Globacom, 54.9 million (27.0 per cent) and 9mobile, 12.8 million (6.49 per cent) of the operators’ market share.
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.
MTN explained that its voice revenue rose because it increased its gross connections and higher usage from its active SIM base. For its instance, its statement revealed that it added 1.7 million subscribers in the period under review.
The mobile operators disclosed that its data revenue grew due to growth in subscriber base and data usage as well. It said its data traffic grew by 84.8 per cent Year-on-Year and usage (MB per user) by 69.8 per cent.
“To enable the growth in subscribers and traffic, we continued to enhance the capacity of our network. In doing so, we frontloaded our capex plan for the year, deploying capex of N162.5 billion in the period to accommodate the sustained demand for data and accelerate the rollout of our 4G network, which now covers approximately 72% of the population and accounts for 76% of data traffic.”
Airtel’s financial statement revealed that it made N112.29bn from calls and N81.29bn from data in Q1 2022, while it earned the sum of N91.44bn from calls and N57.91bn in the corresponding period of 2021.
The second largest mobile operator in the country said its revenue from voice calls grew by 15.9 per cent in the period under review because of the increase in voice usage per customer of 20.8 per cent which increased its ARPU by 20.7 per cent.
It said, “Data revenue grew by 41.1 per cent in constant currency, driven by data customer base growth of 14.9 per cent and data ARPU growth of 37.6 per cent, led by growth in data usage per customer to 4.0 GB per month (from 2.8 GB in the prior year).
“Our continued 4G network expansion and increased smartphone penetration have supported data usage growth. Almost 99 per cent of our sites in Nigeria are now delivering 4G, and smartphone penetration of our customers has increased by almost 1 percentage point.
“Data revenue accounted for 39.1 per cent of total revenue in Nigeria in the year, up by 3.7 per cent on the prior year. For Q4’22, 43.6 per cent of our data customer base were 4G users, contributing to 76.0 per cent of total data usage. Data usage per customer reached 4.2 GB per month and 4G data usage per customer reached 6.5 GB per month, a significant increase on the 4.6 GB usage per customer per month of Q4’21.”
Victor Ezeja is a passionate journalist with six years of experience writing on economy, politics and energy. He holds a Masters degree in Mass Communication.
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