NCC report: Glo is fastest growing telecom operator in Nigeria

Nigeria’s total telecommunications solutions provider, Globacom, is the fastest growing telecom operator in Nigeria, garnering the highest number of subscribers in the first five months of this year.
This emerged in the latest report released by the industry regulator, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
According to the report, Globacom recorded a total number of 2,263,346 new subscribers in the first five months of 2015. The report published on the regulator’s official website indicated that Glo had 28,219,089 active lines at the end of December 2014 and grew it to 30,482,435 at the end of May 2015, showing an addition of 2,263,346 new customers.
Airtel placed second recording 1,983,195 new subscribers for the same period, while MTN placed third with 1,970,176 new subscribers. Etisalat recorded 1,493,515 new customers during the same period.
With this development, it makes the third time in the last one month that Glo has topped the chart as the preferred network in the Nigerian telecom industry.
Early in June, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had credited the company with driving the growth witnessed in the Nigerian telecommunications industry in the last twelve months.
The Bureau, which quoted NCC’s 2015 first quarter report, said Globacom recorded the highest number of new subscribers in the country from May, 2014 to April, 2015 to bring its total subscribers figure to 30.03million. 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%,” the NBS noted in its report.
Also in June, NCC revealed that Glo gained the highest number of internet users in April with over a million new internet users on its network. The industry regulator 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 a total of 1,072,919 additional internet users on its network during the period covered by the report. This increase translates to 67.58% 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. The data showed that 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.