Tag: Subscribers

In line with the constitution which makes 18 years as the age of consent in Nigeria, the NCC is set to enforce the contract between service providers and their subscribers. One of such is to disallow a minor or a person less than 18 years from engaging in the contract of SIM acquisition which requires a person of proper legal status to undertake. In the Reviewed/Draft Registration of Telephone Subscribers Regulations, presented on Tuesday, October 6, 2021, a subscriber is a person of 18 years and above, with a proper legal status, and matured and rational enough to bear certain responsibilities, obligations and liabilities imposed by a contract.

In order not to contravene the constitution, the NCC intends to limit SIM acquisition to those of this legal status. In the Reviewed/Draft Registration of Telephone Subscribers Regulations, the NCC defines any person below the age of 18 as minor, while a “subscriber is a person from the age of 18 years who subscribes to communications services by purchasing a subscription medium or entering into a subscription contract with a licensee.” It is therefore incumbent on parents or guardian of such people to acquire SIMs in their names for their children and wards under this age. However, they must be ready to take responsibilities for any liability that might accrue thereafter from the use of such SIM card. The policy therefore puts a significant responsibility on parents and guardians to monitor the activities of their minors.

The implication of this policy is that any person below the age of 18 is disqualified from registering and owning a SIM card in any of the network companies in Nigeria. If the policy comes in place, network operators will in the short run delete and loss the subscribers who are not of this age. The ability of them to gain back these subscribers in the long run will depend on the ability of parents and guardians to have the trust that will catalyze them to register SIMs for their adolescents. Even at that, those below the age of 18 without parents, guardians or people who can place adequate trust on them will be lost completely until they reach the legal age of contract as provided by the constitution. This may result to another round of revenue loss to the telecoms companies in Nigeria.

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