Despite a slowdown in other parts of the world, the active telephone subscriber base in Nigeria has continued to grow. Between December 2012 and January 2013, 1.2 million new subscribers were added to the various networks, STANLEY OPARA writes
The number of active telecoms subscribers in the country grew by 1,296,433 between December 2012 and January 2013. This represents a growth of 1.145 per cent from the 113,195,951 recorded in November of last year.
This puts the active subscriber base at 114,492,384 as of January 2013 with the struggling Code Division Multiple Access operators contributing nothing to the growth.
Figures from the Nigerian Communications Commission, however, showed a drop of 58,007 in the subscriber base of the CDMA operators from 2,948,562 to 2,890,555 in the period under review.
There were 154,562,024 connected Global System of Mobile telecommunication, CDMA and fixed lines in the country as of January 2013, compared to 151,714,650 in December 2012, according to the NCC.
The installed capacity of all the telecoms providers was put at 226,611,747 in January this year as against 211,808,092 in December last year.
The teledensity was put at 81.78 per cent for January 2013 as against 80.85 per cent last year.
Teledensity is the percentage of connected lines in relation to the population at a given period of time, and its growth is proportionate to the growth in the subscriber base.
The active telephone subscribers in the country had spent a whopping sum of N2.14tn on voice calls and Short Message Service, among other basic services between January 2011 and December 2012.
This is based on an Average Revenue Per User of N912 monthly from telecoms firms in the country like MTN, Globacom, Airtel, Etisalat, Visafone, Starcomms and Multi-Links, among others.
The ARPU is a financial performance benchmark in the telecoms industry that measures the average monthly or yearly revenue generated by GSM, CDMA and fixed telephone operators in a particular country.
In view of this, telephone service subscribers, who increased from the highest of 95,886,714 in December 2011 to 113,195,951 in December 2012, would have spent N2.14tn on mobile services, particularly voice calls between January 2011 and December 2012.
While a little over N1tn was spent on telephone services in 2011, subscribers spent N1.14tn on the services in 2012.
The NCC had revealed that the number of active telephone users in the country stood at 89,840,343 in January 2011 with a monthly ARPU of N912, thus, at least N81.9bn would have been expended on phone calls in the month.
This increased to N82.6bn in February 2011 and N82.9bn in March, when the subscriber base hit 90,583,306 and 90,969,794, respectively.
Subscribers further spent N82.6bn in April of the same year; N82.5bn in May; N82.6bn in June; N82.8bn in July; N83.9bn in August; N85.2bn in September; N85.6bn in October; N87.4bn in November and N87.4bn in December 2011.
At that time, the subscriber base had increased to 90,834,429; 92,094,200; 93,461,436; 93,924,116 and 95,387,893 in July, August, September, October and November; closing at 95,886,714 in December. Therefore, over N1tn was spent on telephone services in 2011.
In 2012, the total estimated telephone service spending was N1.14tn as of December. Specifically, 96,150,836 active subscribers spent an estimated N87.7bn on telephone services in January. This was followed by N88.1bn in February; N90.4bn in March; and N92.2bn in April, when the subscriber base was 96,616,580; 99, 145,013; and 101,077,658, respectively.
Subscribers’ telephone spending continued on an upward trend in May with N92.9bn by 101,814,533 active subscribers. This was followed by N93.4bn in June; N94.3bn in July; N96bn in August; and N97.7bn in September.
By then, the subscriber base had risen from 102,369,999 in June to 107,083,036 in September, 2012.
While N99.9bn was spent on telephone services in October, over 110 million subscribers expended N100.6bn in November and N103.2bn was spent in December 2012 by 113,195,951 telephone subscribers.
Though the decline in the ARPU had been attributed to a number of factors, including penetration to low income users, consistent tariff reduction and serious competition among mobile operators, industry forecasts revealed that it would continue to drop.
Figures from PriceWaterHouse Coopers, which was commissioned by the NCC to put together statistics on the industry in 2012, showed that Nigeria’s outgoing and incoming on-net and off-net calls totalled 22.3 billion minutes in 2012; while 1.8 billion text messages were recorded within the same period.
Similarly, the report showed that while the total call times recorded increased by over five billion minutes from 17 billion in 2011 to 22.3 billion at the end of 2012, SMS volumes also increased by three million, rising from 1.5 billion to 1.8 billion during the same period.
However, with telecoms operators operating different tariffs for on-net calls ranging from N9 to N12, industry analysts said the average tariff charge per minute of call could be conservatively pegged at N15.
In other words, by multiplying 22.3 billion minutes of calls made in 2012 by N10, the call volume is conservatively valued at N223bn.
According to the breakdown of the data from PwC, in 2011, minutes of calls for outgoing on-net; outgoing off-net to mobile; outgoing off-net to fixed networks; outgoing off-net to international networks; outgoing calls to voicemail; outgoing inbound roaming calls stood at 7.3 billion; four billion; 288 million; 315 million; 29 million and three million, respectively.
Apparently, these figures, in 2012, increased to 10.2 billion; 4.7 billion; 352 million; 403 million; 10 million and three million.
On incoming calls during the period, minutes of incoming calls from other mobile operators increased from 3.9 billion to 4.6 billion; calls from fixed operators increased from 472 million to 537 million; calls from international operators into the country moved up from 745 million to 877 million; while inbound roaming increased slightly from two million to three million.