Distribution of Active Telecom Lines in Nigeria in the Second Quarter of 2021

The telecoms sector recorded a total number of 187,275,547 active subscribers in the second quarter of 2021, which ended on the 21st of June. This is a reduction by 2.5% from the 192,081,282 subscribers recorded in the first quarter. A breakdown of this figure shows that MTN Communications got 73,571,192 of these lines. This is followed by Airtel and Globacom Nigeria Limited with a total of 50,665,723 and 50,130,540 active lines, respectively. The least number of active lines of 12,908,092 was recorded by 9Mobile Nigeria (See Figure 1).

The figures show that while Airtel and 9Mobile recorded improvements in the active lines by 0.56% and 0.45% respectively, MTN and Globacom lost 3.1% and 5.3% of their active lines between April and June 2021. Further analysis shows that MTN Nigeria controlled about 39% of active lines in the telecoms sector, Airtel and Globacom owned about 27% each, while 9Mobile controlled about 7% only in the second quarter of 2021 (See Figure 2 below).

Internet Subscriber Data

The total number of internet data subscribers for the second quarter of 2021, ending June 30 has been released by the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC), a total number of 149.8 million subscribers engaged in data subscription for the month of June. This fell short of about 140.2 million subscribers recorded in May by 0.2%. MTN Nigeria, accounts for almost half of the data subscribers of 59.6 million, amounting to about 43% of the total market share. They next in line Globacom with about 37.9 million subscriber or 27% of the market, who are closely followed by Airtel with about 26% of the total marker subscribers, and lastly by 9Mobile which managed to garner about 6.1 million data subscribers or 4% of the total market share (See Figure 1)

Table 1: Number of Internet Data Subscribers by Network for the Month of June, 2021

 Source: Compile with data from https://www.ncc.gov.ng/statistics-reports/industry-overview#gsm-2

Like the active telecoms lines subscribe, the number of active of internet data subscribers also witnessed some changes in the data released for the month of June, 2021. When compared with data for the month of May, Airtel and Globacom recorded marginal gains of 0.3 and 0.8%, respectively in the number of internet data subscriptions, while the reverse was the case for Mobile and MTN which shelved 1.8% and 1.0% of their data subscribers, respectively (See Figure 3 below).

Porting Activities

The porting trend for the month of June recorded that 616 mobile numbers were transferred from one service provider to another, while also keeping the same sim card. This is against the month of May where no subscriber ported to a new network. Airtel recorded 360 inward transfers from other networks, 9Mobile recorded 191, MTN received 65, while Globacom received none