Nigeria Has Lost 15.5 Million Subscribers Following The SIM Registration Ban
Nigeria has lost 15.5 million subscribers following the SIM registration ban
Nigeria is reeling from the SIM registration ban's impact, with mobile subscriber numbers plummeting dramatically in just four months.
According to Intelligence by Techpoint, Nigeria lost 15.5 million subscribers between December 2020 and March 2021, based on data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
Nigeria had 190 million mobile subscribers in 2020, but that figure increased to 192 million in March 2021.
The Nigerian government banned the sale and registration of new SIM cards in December 2020 and set a December 30 deadline for people to link their SIM cards to their National Identity Number (NIN).
In retrospect, it is unclear whether the government considered the COVID-19 risks, as the move coincided with a sharp increase in positive cases in the months that followed.
MTN and Airtel's financial reports for the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 indicated that this policy would also harm telecom companies. Both companies experienced a decline in subscriber numbers during the time period under consideration.
The NCC's data almost entirely confirms these figures.
Nigeria had up to 207.9 million mobile subscribers in November 2020, but the country has been on a downward spiral since then, losing over 15 million subscribers.
In comparison to previous years, this may be considered abysmal.
Nigeria, by comparison, increased its subscriber base by 15.7 million subscribers between March 2019 and March 2020. Between March 2018 and March 2019, subscribers increased by a staggering 23 million.
The NCC's subscriber numbers could be considered inflated, as they do not account for people who use multiple SIM cards in various devices.
As a result, the actual number of mobile subscribers is significantly less than what the NCC's records indicate. Though the regulator had previously intended to standardize the data, nothing came of it until the NIN order.
The rapid decline in subscriber numbers in such a short period of time raises concerns about the size of Nigeria's addressable Internet market, as the majority of lost subscribers are Internet users.
Nigeria lost 9.2 million Internet subscribers between December 2020 and March 2021, according to the NCC.
While the data wars of 2019 and 2020 were particularly exciting to watch, Nigerian telecom companies suffered a three-month losing streak from December 2020 to March 2021.
MTN took the brunt of the attack, losing 3.8 million Internet subscribers. To put this in context, MTN lost a total of 4.8 million subscribers. This means that approximately 70% of them were Internet users.
Airtel, which was previously a formidable competitor of MTN in the data market, lost approximately 3.5 million Internet users. This represents approximately 67% of the subscribers it lost in total.
Glo fared significantly better than the first two, losing 1.3 million Internet subscribers, or roughly 68% of its total mobile users.
Whether or not the SIM ban is implemented, 9mobile has struggled in recent years to maintain its subscriber base. It did, however, lose the fewest Internet subscribers, at a respectable 701k.
In Conclusion
However, this figure becomes strange when one considers that it lost only 132k mobile subscribers. This would imply that approximately 569 9mobile subscribers were disconnected during this time period.
The loss of Internet subscribers by Nigerian telcos is also telling, as more people needed to be online due to the pandemic, but the SIM ban period may have been a stumbling block.
Fortunately, the prohibition has been lifted, though NIN registrations continue.
