Globacom leads in telecom subscriber acquisition for 2015

Globacom, total ICT solutions provider, has beaten the other three major telecom companies, MTN, Airtel and Etisalat, in the race to sign on new subscribers in the first five months of this year.

According to subscriber data information for the month of May just released on the website of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Glo activated a total of 2,263,346 new lines on its network ahead of Airtel which came second with 1,983,195 new subscribers.

The NCC data showed that Glo had 28,219,089 active lines at the end of December, 2014, but this increased to 30,482,435 at the end of May 2015, showing an addition of 2,263,346 new customers. MTN had 1,970,176 new lines in the first five months of 2015, while Etisalat recorded 1,493,515 new activations.

The development corroborates the statement released early June by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in which it credited Globacom with driving the growth witnessed in the Nigerian telecommunications industry in the last 12 months.

NBS noted that Globacom recorded the highest number of new subscribers from May, 2014 to April, 2015 to bring its total subscribers figure to 30.03million. It stated that the monthly growth rate in GSM subscriber figure since May 2014 averaged 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.

The NCC had also in June indicated 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% of total number of new internet subscriber figure of 1,587,514 for the telecom networks for the month of April.

The NCC data also 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. Airtel Nigeria, it said, had 17.2 million internet users in April, as against 16,603,147 internet customers recorded in March. The data showed that internet users on the Airtel Nigeria network increased by 669,518 in April. For Etisalat, 10.4 million of its customers browsed the internet in April, against the 10,189,568 users in March, showing an increase of 231,661 in the new month.