February 15, (THEWILL) – Nigerian telecom service providers have lost a total of 9,137,415 voice subscribers in 2021 according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The number of active subscribers dropped by 4.5 percent from the 204,601,313 active voice subscribers recorded in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 195,463,898 active voice subscribers in the last quarter of 2021.
The NBS revealed the development in its Telecom Sector Data released on Monday.
In the last four months of 2021, the data revealed that a total of 141,971,560 subscribers were active on the internet as against 154,301,195 in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The numbers represent a 7.99 percent decrease in the number of active data subscribers as of the fourth quarter of 2021.
Airtel had in its financial statement for the full year 2021 blamed the setback recorded in the number of subscribers to the Federal Government directive on National Identity Number-SIM linkage.
When the directive was made in December 2020, new line acquisition was discontinued.
“New customer acquisitions were discontinued until significant progress had been made on linking the active customer base with verified NINs. Natural churn in the customer base tempered the growth in active mobile customers in the nine-month period”, Airtel had said, which lost millions of customers.
The data revealed further that in the last quarter of 2021, MTN led with 73,594,682 subscribers, Globacom followed with 54,817,353, Airtel 53,926,886 and 9Mobile closed the year with 12,789,344 subscribers.
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