Nigerians may have bought over 804,000 smartphones in the first quarter of 2023, MTN Nigeria Communications Plc has hinted.
In its unaudited results for the quarter ended 31 March 2023, the telecommunication firm stated that it grew its smartphone penetration to 52.7 per cent in the quarter by adding over 804,000 new smartphones to its network.
It said, “In addition, we added over 804k new smartphones to our network in Q1, bringing smartphone penetration to 52.7 per cent.”
The Nigerian telecom market is multi-SIMed and an industry source explained that this could imply that some of the new phones were on another network before, and their users just got on MTN’s network. The source, however, stated that it signified an overall growth in the smartphone population in the country.
Meanwhile, MTN’s overall revenue grew by 20.63 per cent to N568.14bn in Q1, 2023 from N470.98bn in Q1, 2022 despite rising inflation and cash scarcity.
MTN Nigeria Chief Executive Officer, Karl Toriola, noted that the limited availability of cash affected customers’ ability to buy airtime.
He said, “The limited availability of the new notes resulted in cash shortages, which impacted our customers’ ability to recharge through physical airtime vouchers (affecting mostly customers who did not have access to digital recharge channels) and over-the-counter (OTC) transactions within our MoMo agent network.
“The cash shortages affected the broader macroeconomy, with a consequent significant impact on the private sector.” In Q1 2023, MTN’s data revenue (N227.84bn) grew slightly above voice revenue (N277.61bn) for the first time. This is a first for any telco in Nigeria, and it signifies an increasing uptake in online services among Nigerians.
Toriola added, “Data revenue rose by 40.0 per cent on the sustained growth of our active data users and increased data usage.
“This was enabled by our sustained investment in our networks to drive 4G and 5G coverage and enhance the quality and capacity of the network to support the rising data traffic. As a result, our 4G network now covers 79.3 per cent of the population, up from 79.1 per cent in December 2022, and data usage (GB per user) grew by 31.3 per cent to 7.8GB.”
SOURCE: THE PUNCH
