The phenomenal growth in Nigerian telecoms sector continues as subscriber base peaked at 46.2 million at the end of third quarter of the year. The nation’s teledensity, considered the number of phone to 100 people, is 27.42, according to statistics released weekend by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) at the weekend.
According to the official statistics, total connected lines at the end of Q3 2007 stands at 46,228,173 lines with GSM users dominating with 43,593,310 lines (94%). On the other hand, fixed wired/wireless services follow with 2,235,257 (5%) of total connected lines while mobile CDMA accounts for 399,606 lines (1%) during the same period.
On the hand, there is a marginal drop between total connected and ‘active’ lines, regarded in telecoms industry best practice as subscribers that have made a call within the last 90 days. It is in apparent response to the need to make that distinction in a bid to check operators that cite inactive lines as part of their overall subscriber base to gain market edge when declaring their market share.
Total active lines now stands at 38,393,624 lines with fixed wired/wireless service accounting for 1,391,648 lines; GSM mobiles stand at 36,692,806 and mobile CDMA stands at 309,170 lines.
Analysts told Technology Times weekend that they anticipate slow subscriber uptake of mobile phone lines often witnessed in the last quarter of the year when operators drive up their business with various promotional incentives. NCC had placed a ban on promotional activities by the “big three” GSM operators, MTN Nigeria, Glo mobile and Celtel Nigeria, due to widespread congestion on their networks.
Intercellular spoksman, Fidel Otuya, told Technology Times weekend that the company shareholders meet today to decide on a planned acquisition of 70 per cent stake in the private telecoms operator (PTO) by Sudan Telecommunications Company (Sudatel), the national telecoms company of Sudan.
Last week, Technology Times had reported the planned acquisition, which if okayed by Intercellular shareholders at an emergency general meeting (EGM) to hold today, will mark the Sudanese operator’s initial foray into Nigeria and inject some funds to drive the Nigerian operator’s network expansion, aggressive marketing and network upgrade to reposition its future growth in the unified service market fusing mobile and fixed services.
According to the latest NCC statistics, quarter-on-quarter growth in the mobile GSM sector has been appreciable peaking at 34,240,613 lines and 38,062,353 lines at the end of first and second quarters of this year respectively.
Within the same period, fixed wired/wireless service growth rate is marginal compared to the exponentially growing GSM sector with increase from 1,697,567 lines at Q1, 2007 to 1,722,507 lines at Q2, 2007.
Significantly, the figure shows that Nigerian telecoms market has witnessed a phenomenon common to most telecoms market that have hitherto been faced by pent up demand: explosive uptake of mobile services followed by tapering growth in the market as the curve flattens.
In 2001, the year that three GSM operators, MTN Nigeria, Econet Wireless Nigeria (now Celtel Nigeria) and Mtel went live with their service in August that year, the total subscriber base was 866,782 connected lines and teledensity was 0.73. Of that number, the fixed line services, like NITEL and other PTOs like Multi-Links (now Multi-Links Telkom), Intercellular among others accounted for 600,321 while GSM operators had 266,461 lines.
If existing fixed line players have had it so good but recorded only over half a million lines prior to the entry of the GSM operators, the impact of the latter’s entry were to be felt by year 2002 when total connected lines had nearly quadrupled to 2,271,050 lines and teledensity of 1.89.
Within the period, GSM operators now accounted for 1,569,050 lines from 266,461 lines the previous year. The fixed line market segment was now 702,000 lines, a marginal increase over the previous year’s 600,321 lines.
By the end of 2003, a few market landmarks, like the entry of second national operator, Globacom Limited, that spun off its mobile business unit, Glo Mobile, to compete in the GSM space saw the introduction of per second billing and other market innovations like ‘friends and family’, that were soon replicated by rival players, was beginning to change the market space.
Part of that change was the doubling of total connected in the country to 4,021, 9445 with GSM players then consolidating market lead with 3,149,472 lines and fixed line players accounting for 872,473 lines. Teledensity pushed into 3.35 from the previous year’s 1.89.
Dec32007