By Samson Akintaro 


For the first time this year, number of active subscriptions for mobile telephony services in Nigeria dropped by 881,586 in the month of July.

The decline brought subscription figures to 161.4 million as against 162.3 million recorded in June.

Monthly statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday revealed that the loss occurred on two out of the four mobile networks.

According to NCC, MTN, which is the largest operator by number of subscribers, lost 999,891 users to close at 65.5 million subscriptions in July while 9Mobile shed 246,221 to record 15.6 million subscriptions in the month.

However, Globacom and Airtel gained more subscribers in the month. Glo added 214,646 subscriptions to hit 40.32 million, while Airtel gained 149,880 to record 40.04 million subscriptions in the month.

In the first three months of the year, 4.2 million mobile lines were activated to bring the total number of active GSM lines to 148.8 million as at the end of March.

However, April activations represented the highest monthly growth the operators have ever recorded so far as they activated 11.2 million lines to bring the total subscriptions to 160 million.

In May, the figure rose by 2 million to hit 162 million, while there was a marginal increase in June which left the subscription figure at 162.3 million.

Despite its loss in July, MTN retained its number one spot with 40 per cent share of the market, while Globacom and Airtel trail each other with equal market share of 25 per cent, leaving 9Mobile with 10 per cent.

Meanwhile, internet subscriptions across the mobile networks continue to grow despite the downtrend in general mobile subscriber database.

The number of active subscribers for data services on the four GSM networks rose to 103.6 million in July compared with 102.8 million recorded in the previous month.

MTN continued its dominance in the internet space as well with 39 million data subscribers while it was followed by Globacom which recorded 27.1 million.

Airtel and 9Mobile’s data subscriptions stood at 27 million and 10.3 million respectively.