NCC Reveals Globacom as No 1 In New Subscriber Acquisition In Nigeria

This is good news for full Nigerian Telecommunication Company, globacom as it has again emerged the preferred choice of new telephone subscribers as the network recorded the highest number of new lines with 2,263,346 activations in the first five months of this year.

In the latest subscriber figures for the telecom industry released on its website by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Glo which had 28,219,089 active lines at the end of December 2014 recorded a subscriber base of 30,482,435 at the end of May 2015, showing an addition of 2,263,346 new customers.

Globacom’s figure showed the highest growth in the industry within the first five months of 2015. Airtel which came second recorded 1,983,195 new subscribers for the same period, while MTN had 1,970,176. Etisalat had the least growth with 1,493,515 new customers.

This marks 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 with 1.63 million telephone users joining the network 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.