The past twelve months have been eventful for the Nigerian tower industry. IHS had a busy year acquiring HTN Towers, issuing a $800M corporate bond, restructuring MTN’s equity in the company and kicking off their ‘big five’ energy initiative. American Tower began to build towers whilst continuing the integration and upgrade of Airtel’s sites and driving up co-locations. MTN was fined NGN330bn (US$1.6B) by the regulator and EMTS defaulted on its loan repayments, leading to a takeover by its lenders and rebranding to 9mobile. TowerXchange examines 2016’s key developments what is on the horizon for Africa’s largest mobile market. Themes that will also be discussed at The Meetup Africa & Middle East later this year.
The Nigerian Telecoms Sector
There are 154 million mobile subscribers in Nigeria, with telecoms contributing 9.8 percent of Nigeria’s GDP (Source: NCC). Over 99 percent of mobile subscribers use GSM technology, with MTN having the largest market share (40 percent) followed by Glo (24 percent), Airtel (23 percent) and EMTS (13 percent).
There are two CDMA operators, Visafone and Multilinks (whose subscriber base has continued to decline) and a host of LTE-only players including Smile, Spectranet, InterC (formerly CDMA player Intercellular Networks), SWIFT, Bitflux Communications and Ntel (which acquired the assets of and fixed line operator Nigerian Telecommunications – NITEL – and its mobile subsidiary M-Tel through the liquidation process in April 2015).
Nigeria’s total subscriber base has grown by 36 percent in the past four years, with recent growth impacted by the disconnection of unregistered SIMs in accordance with the government regulations. A further 62 million additional mobile subscribers are expected by 2020, illustrating the huge growth still expected in what is already Africa’s largest mobile market. To read the full article, click here.
August 16, 2017
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