The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has reported that active subscriptions for mobile services in Nigeria dropped to 220.9 million in May 2023, representing 1% or 2.4 million decrease from the active subscriptions reported the preceding month.
The May figures indicated the third consecutive month of declining trend in mobile subscription level. In April there was a drop of 1% decline in subscriptions while in March, the subscriptions across the mobile networks dipped by 0.4%. As of April, active subscriptions across the networks of MTN, Glo, Airtel, and 9mobile stood at 223.3 million.
According to the NCC’s data, the decline in the subscription rate in May is primarily due to the 3 million subscriptions loss on MTN network as it continues to deactivate SIMs that had not been linked with the National Identification Number (NIN) as mandated by the government.
With the drop in the actively connected mobile lines recorded in May, the nation’s teledensity, which measures the number of active telephone connections per 100 inhabitants living within an area, also declined to 115.91% from 117.17% recorded in April.
A further analysis of the commission’s data on the mobile subscriptions nationwide showed that MTN, the largest operator by subscriber number, recorded 3 million decline in its subscriptions, thereby bringing its total active subscriptions to 85.6 million from 88.6 million it recorded in April 2023.
As was the trend in April, Glo recorded a 225,714 increase in subscriptions in the month, thus maintaining its position as the second-largest operator by subscriber number in the month under review. The telco’s new activations increased its total subscriptions 62 million from 60.9 million recorded in April this year.
Similarly, Airtel also recorded an increase of 195,923 in its subscriptions in May, which raised its total subscriptions to 60.5 million from 60.3 million in April while 9mobile recorded the highest gain in May with 257,320 subscriptions, which increased its active subscriptions to 13.7 million from the 13.4 million it had in April.
There are strong indications that the nation’s active mobile subscriptions may further decreased in the months ahead in view of the moves by the NCC to order operators to deactivate any line that has not been used for any revenue-generating activity for 6 months.
This directive is contained in a new Draft Quality of Service Business Rules posted on the industry regulator’s website, which also provided that the owner of the line would have another 6 months to re-activate the same line, failure upon which he or she loses the line completely.
Industry experts believe that the latest directive by the commission may not be unconnected with the increasing number of inactive lines across mobile networks. For instance, it noted that unused or abandoned lines across MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and 9mobile networks rose to 96.7 million in February this year.
The data further reflected that the four MNOs had a total of N323.6 million connected lines as of February this year. However, the active lines across the networks at the end of the month totalled 226.8 million.
