Nigeria’s telecom Industry generates N3.2 trillion, Service providers N2.7 trillion revenue

Nigeria telecommunication industry continue to grow in bounds as the
industry’s activities in 2021 showed that a sum of N3,247,595,808,883.87 was generated.

GSM Service providers which include
MTN, Globacom, Airtel, 9Mobile, Smile Communications, and Ntel, generated a total of N2,774,128,600,000.00 revenue in the year, 2021.

Meanwhile, the operational cost of GSM operators stood at 1,658,235,220,000.00.

In 2021 Subscriber/Network Data Annual Report released on Thursday by Policy Competition and Economic Analysis Department of the Nigerian Communication (NCC), revealed that the operators made a profit of N37.8 billion from a total of 9.462 billion text messages sent by subscribers on the six networks last year at a fixed rate of N4.00 per SMS.

The GSM operators made domestic investment of N1.124 trillion while the fixed wired operators’ revenue was N375,038,363,760 with Internet Service Provider coming behind with a revenue earning of N59,993,181,018.69.

According to the NCC, the telecos paid N32.9 billion to the Nigerian Government as value added tax while they realised N3 billion from collocation and infrastructure sharing.

The NCC’s report showed that subscriber number decreased from 204,601,313 subscribers in 2020 to 195,463,898 active voice subscriptions as at December 2021 with a loss of 9,137,415 subscriptions.

This represents about 4.46% decline in total subscription within the period under consideration.

The report attributed the decrease in Operators’ subscriber base to the effect of the directive from NCC in December 2020 to all GSM Operators to suspend the sale and registration of new SIMs, SIM swaps and all porting activities.

The report indicated that Nigeria`s teledensity decreased from 107.18% as at December 2020 to 102.40% by December 31st 2021 while the number of Internet Subscribers decreased from 154,318,925 subscription as at December 2020 to 141,994,285 Subscriptions as at December 2021 representing a decline of 8%.

Also broadband penetration decreased from 45.02% as at December 2020 to 40.88% as at December, 2021 just as broadband subscriptions decreased from 85,941,222 subscriptions in December 2020 to 78,041,883 subscriptions as at December 2021.

The Commission stated that there was an increase in the volume of data consumed in the year end December 2021 when compared with the year ended December 2020.

The total volume of data consumed by subscribers increased to 353,118.89TB as at December 2021 from 209,917.40TB as at December 2020. This represents an increase of 68.2% in data consumption within the period.