Telcos Active Subscribers Decline by Over 100 Million in March, NCC Reveals

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has revealed that 107 million mobile lines connected to telecommunication companies, 9mobile, MTN, Globacom, and Airtel became inactive in the month of March.

A deactivated mobile number is one that a mobile provider has removed from service for an end-user, either because the end-user has switched operators or because their account has been canceled for some other reason. All deactivated numbers are eventually recycled and made available to new subscribers.

The latest data from the Commission reveals that the four telecom giants had N306.3 million connected lines as of March, however, active lines across the networks at the end of the month stood at 199.2 million, reaching a decline of 107.1 million.

This implies that the telecommunication giants lost revenue from 35% of their customers and only generated from about 65%.

About a week ago, Investors King gathered that MTN claimed 19 million of its users were affected when the government ordered telecoms to prohibit outgoing calls on phone lines that were not yet linked on April 4, 2022.

However, as of April 25, 8.7 million people who were previously restricted, had submitted their NINs for verification, with about 1.2 million of them being reinstated.

In its first-quarter financial results, MTN reported that its subscribers had increased to 70.2 million as of March 30, 2022. However, as of April, nearly 10 million of its subscribers had not yet linked their NIN.

It is important to understand that, while telecoms companies always have inactive lines together with an increase in active users and new activations, the ban on SIM registration and many subscribers’ inability to retrieve their lines between December 9, 2020, and April 19, 2021, exacerbated the problem as abandoned lines began to stack up each month.