GLO BEATS MTN, AIRTEL & ETISALAT IN NUMBER OF NEW SUBSCRIBERS

Dr. Mike Adenuga, Founder/Chairman, Globacom

The latest report from the telecommunications industry regulator, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), which was made available to Tectono Business Review, has it that Dr. Mike Adenuga’s Globacom has so far recorded the highest number of new Global System for Mobile subscribers in 2015.

Yes, the subscriber data on NCC website for January to May this year indicated that Glo amassed 2,263,346 new activations in the first five months of this year to raise its base from 28,219,089 active lines at the end of December 2014 to 30,482,435 subscribers at the end of May 2015. Airtel was second with 1, 983,195 new subscribers for the same period, while MTN had 1,970,176 new subscriptions. Etisalat recorded the least growth in customer base with 1,493,515 new customers.

Quoting NCC’s 2015 first quarter report, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Globacom recorded the highest number of new subscribers in the country from May 2014, to April, 2015. 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 per cent,” the NBS noted in its report.

Moreover, in June, the NCC data showed that Glo gained the highest number of Internet users in April with over a million new Internet users on its network. NCC 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 1,072,919 additional Internet users on its network during the period covered by the report. This increase translates to 67.58 per cent 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. Airtel Nigeria, it said, had 17.2 million Internet users in April, as against 16,603,147 Internet customers recorded in March.

According to the data, 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.