Nigeria mobile market going places

Nigeria’s mobile communications sector added 7.15 million net new subscribers in Q408 to end-December, taking the total number of subscribers in the market to 62.99 million. The addition of 22.59 million subscribers represented a 56 per cent annual growth rate, with recent figures from the Nigerian telecom regulator NCC showing that a further 1.17 million mobile subscribers were added during January 2009 to raise the country’s end-January total to 64.16 million.

GSM market leader MTN recorded a gain of 2.91 million in Q408 – a Nigerian record. It ended the year with 23.08 million users, almost 6 million ahead of nearest rival Zain, which ended the year with 17.20 million users. Having wrestled second place from Glo Mobile in Q308, Zain consolidated its lead in Q4, adding 1.29 million customers compared to the 630,000 added by Glo Mobile, which ended the year on just over 16 million users.

The two remaining GSM networks in Nigeria are government-owned Nitel, which counted 260 million customers at the end of the year, and the latest entrant Etisalat, which managed to added almost 400,00 customers in its first quarter of operation.

There are now four mobile CDMA networks operating in Nigeria, and they contributed to the quarterly gain. On aggregate, they added 1.93 million customers in Q4, only just behind the record gain of 2.01 million recorded in the previous quarter. This took the total mobile CDMA customer base 6.05 million at the end of the year; although the NCC’s figures show that there was a net loss in January, driving the base back down to 5.87 million.

In terms of individual operators’ performances in Q408, Visafone added 980,000 subscribers, ending the period with 2.21 million compared with the 1.99 million subscribers on Multi-Links’ network. The former leading CDMA operator in Nigeria added 510,000 subscribers in the quarter. Meanwhile, Starcomms added 360,000 users in Q408 to break the one million barrier, ending the quarter on 1.16 million users. Reliance is Nigeria’s fourth CDMA operator and was able to garner 70,000 subscribers in its first two months of operation to end-2008.