MTN’s Nigerian Subscriber Base Shrinks By Nearly 7%

MTN lost 4.5-million subscribers in Nigeria as it moved to comply with the

An employee of mobile phone operator MTN tries to register a client with the network in the Obalende district of Lagos last month. government’s demand that it properly registers its customers. Last year, Nigeria fined MTN $1,000 for each of 5.2-million subscribers not properly identified, in the country’s drive to prevent Boko Haram militants using cellphones to co-ordinate attacks and buy arms. MTN said in its March quarterly update, released on Thursday, that the Nigerian subscribers it was required to cut off meant its subscriber base in that country dropped 6.9% to 57-million from the end of December, causing its total subscriber base to fall 1.4% to 227.5-million. Its South African subscriber numbers fell 1.7% from the December quarter, to 30.1-million. Its domestic prepaid subscriber base declined by 1.8% to 24.9-million, which MTN blamed on "seasonal trends following strong promotions" over Christmas. Its postpaid base declined 0.8% to 5.2-million, which the network said was largely due to "the alignment of the Autopage subscriber base to MTN’s, the disconnection of telemetry SIMs and the expiration of legacy low-cost packages". Its overall average monthly revenue per user in SA fell 9.2% to R83.10 in the March quarter from the December quarter and was nearly 5% lower than the matching quarter last year. The biggest decline was in prepaid average monthly usage, which fell 10.1% to R68.30, while postpaid fell 5.6% to R154.70. MTN said its average revenue from SA was hurt during the quarter by "the exceptionally unfortunate 48-hour network outage experienced in February". MTN Irancell increased its subscriber base by 1% quarter on quarter to 46.6-million, "in a highly penetrated market". Local currency average revenue per user decreased by 1.4%. Data revenue grew by 20.1% in the March quarter compared with a year earlier, contributing 24.2% of the group’s total revenue. Data traffic rocketed by 123.3% from the previous year while voice traffic grew 12.1%, MTN’s trading update said.