Telecommunication subscribers in Nigeria spent at least N615.08bn on calls and data in the first quarter of 2022, according to data from the financial statement of the MTN Nigeria Communications Plc and Airtel Nigeria.
This is a 23.09 per cent increase from the N499.66bn they made in the corresponding period of 2021.
The amount 9mobile and Globacom made from these revenue streams are not available as they are not public traded companies.
Meanwhile, according to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission, MTN and Airtel are the two major voice carriers in the nation.
The commission revealed that a total 150,825,830,687.40 minutes of calls were made in 2020 in its industry statistics report for 2020.
Of this, a total of 145,420,101,695 calls (96.42 per cent) were made from both MTN and Airtel lines, with calls from MTN lines totalling 103,531,547,686 minutes and Airtel totalling 41,888,554,009 minutes.
In Q1 2022, MTN Nigeria made N258.77bn from calls and N162.73bn from data. In the corresponding period of 2021, the company made N244.62bn from calls and N105.69bn from data.
In Q1 2022, Airtel made N112.29bn ($268m) from calls and N81.29bn ($194m) from data. It made N91.44bn ($240m) from calls and N57.91bn ($152m) in the corresponding period of 2021.
According to Airtel, its voice revenue grew by 15.9 per cent in the period under review because of the increase in voice usage per customer of 20.8 per cent which increased its ARPU by 20.7 per cent.
It said, “Data revenue grew by 41.1 per cent in constant currency, driven by data customer base growth of 14.9 per cent and data ARPU growth of 37.6 per cent, led by growth in data usage per customer to 4.0 GB per month (from 2.8 GB in the prior year).
“Our continued 4G network expansion and increased smartphone penetration have supported data usage growth. Almost 99 per cent of our sites in Nigeria are now delivering 4G, and smartphone penetration of our customers has increased by almost 1 percentage point.”
“Data revenue accounted for 39.1 per cent of total revenue in Nigeria in the year, up by 3.7 per cent on the prior year. For Q4’22, 43.6 per cent of our data customer base were 4G users, contributing to 76.0 per cent of total data usage. Data usage per customer reached 4.2 GB per month and 4G data usage per customer reached 6.5 GB per month, a significant increase on the 4.6 GB usage per customer per month of Q4’21.”
MTN added that its voice revenue grew because it increased its gross connections and higher usage from its active SIM base.
It stated that its data revenue grew due to growth in subscriber base and data usage. It said its data traffic grew by 84.8 per cent Year-on-Year and usage (MB per user) by 69.8 per cent.
