SUBSCRIBER GROWTH: AGAIN, GLO LEADS IN NCC REPORT

Nigeria’s total telecommunications operator, Globacom, has again led others in subscriber growth as reported by the industry regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

The 2015 half year report published on NCC’s website shows Globacom as recording the highest growth rate of 5.86 percent in the second quarter of 2015.

The network grew its subscriber base from 29,577,125 at the end of March to 31,256,677 at the end of June.

This performance, according to NCC’s latest report is consistent with Glo’s impressive growth pattern since the beginning of the year as recorded by the regulator and other independent research groups.

Earlier in June 2015, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had credited the telecoms network with driving the sectoral growth in the last 12 months.

The closest operator to Glo in the latest report is Etisalat which grew its network from 22,235,557 in the first quarter to 22,852,232 in the second quarter of the year. Etisalat averaged 3.42 subscriber growth in the second quarter.

Airtel placed third by growing its network from 28,680,757 in the first quarter to 29,564,766 in the second quarter, achieving a total of 3.08 percent subscriber growth rate in the second quarter.

MTN brought up the rear by recording the lowest growth rate of 2.72 percent. The operator grew its subscriber base from 61,149,397 in the first quarter to 62,813,111 in the second quarter.

The Bureau, which quoted NCC’s 2015 first quarter report, indicated that Globacom recorded the highest number of new subscribers in the country with 1.63 million telephone users joining the network from May, 2014 to April, 2015 to bring its total subscribers’ figure to 30.03 million.
It stated that the monthly growth rate in GSM subscriber figure since May 2014 average 0.95 per cent, with Globacom driving the growth.

“The growth in subscribers was mainly driven by Globacom, which recorded an average rate of 1.45 per cent over the period, closely followed by Etisalat with 1.37 per cent and Airtel with 1.29 per cent, while MTN recorded the lowest average monthly growth in subscribers at 0.44%,” the NBS noted in its report.

Also in June, NCC revealed that Glo gained the highest number of internet users in April with over a million new internet users on its network.

The industry regulator said that Globacom had 19,690,526 subscribers surfing the net with its network in April, up from 18,617,607 users in March.
In essence, the operator gained a total of 1,072,919 additional internet users on its network during the period covered by the report. This increase translates to 67.58 percent of total number of new internet subscriber figure of 1,587,514 for the telecom networks for the month of April.

On the other hand, the NCC data showed that MTN lost 384,487 internet subscribers in April, after it recorded 39,520,285 users, down from 39,904,772 in March 2015.