Subscriber Number Slides in February, As Glo Maintains Steady Growth

 

Recent statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the telecoms industry regulator, showed that subscriber number dropped across all networks from 174,012,136 in January to 173,670,038 in February this year, with a difference of 342,098.

Despite the overall drop in subscriber number, Globacom, however, maintained a steady growth in its subscriber number with the same period under review, making it the preferred network for new subscribers.

The statistics, which is for the month of February 2019, showed that Globacom added 400,879 new subscribers, which was the highest gain by any operator. 9mobile was second with 345,264 new customers, while Airtel came third with 4,559 new users.

MTN, however, suffered loss of subscribers in the month under review.

With the latest NCC statistics, Globacom had 46,004,517 subscribers on its network in February, while Airtel had 44,975,532. Globacom thus increased its margin over the third largest operator by 1,028,985 subscribers in that month.  In January, Glo had 632,665 users more than Airtel, as the figure for the two operators stood at 45,603,638 for Globacom and 44,970,973 for Airtel.

While Globacom customer base grew by 0.87 per cent in February, Airtel's grew by 0.01 per cent in the same month.

For 9mobile, its subscriber base grew by 2.1 per cent in February to close at 16,730,581 after adding 345,264 subscribers to the 16,385,317 it had in January. While Glo led 9mobile by 29,218,321 subscribers in January, the gap widened to 29,273,936 in February 2019.

The latest data shows that Globacom has maintained a steady rise in new customer acquisition for several months. For instance, in November last year, the network added 1,691,133 new customers to have a total of 43,273,188 subscribers, compared to the 41,582,055 subscribers it had in the preceding month of October.

The figures rose further to 45,255,297 at the end of December 2018 and 45,603,638 at the end of January this year.

Reacting to the new statistics released by NCC, Globacom said its steady subscriber growth was a result of its commitment to continuous improvement in infrastructure and service delivery.