By Emmanuel Elebeke

The contribution of the nation’s telecom sector to the economy took a declining dimension in the first quarter of 2015. This followed its contribution of N1, 344,485.25 million in the first quarter of 2015, in real terms. This figure represents 8.38 per cent contribution to the nation’s Gross Domestic Production (GDP) in the period under review.

File: Telecom (GSM neteworks)

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its latest sectorial reports made available to Vanguard, the figure represents the total economic output of the telecoms sector to the economy for the opening quarter of 2015, a marginal decline from the 2014 average contribution of 8.46 per cent.

The study shows that the opening quarter of 2015 recorded a real growth rate of 5.36 per cent, a rise of 0.61 point points from the 2014 average growth rate, which was 4.75 per cent.

NBS said that the only negative year on year growth rates in the industry were recorded in 2011, with the lowest rate reaching 6.45 per cent in the third quarter, yet the following quarter saw the highest rate recording 8.67 per cent, which has not been matched to date.

However, the share of telecommunications in real GDP was said to have fluctuated between a relatively narrow margin between 2010 and Q1 of 2015, peaking at 9.32 per cent in Q1 of 2010, and reaching a low of 7.68 per cent in Q3 of 2012.

Unexpectedly, the annual averages showed steady marginal declines; from 9.03 per cent of real GDP in 2010, it declined to 8.68 per cent in 2011, with marginal declines of 0.04 per cent points in 2012, 0.07 per cent points in 2013 and 0.11 per cent points in 2014.

Subscribers in April 2015

Mobile subscribers using GSM dominate, with 98.34 per cent of the total, followed by CDMA with 1.54 percent of the total, whist fixed wire and wireless make up 0.09% and 0.04% respectively.

Mobile Subscribers (GSM) 

A total of 143,057,324 subscribers were registered with GSM technology to the four networks of MTN, Etisalat, Globacom and Airtel as of April 2015. As shown in figure three, MTN dominated the number of subscriptions, with 61,218,803 subscribers (42.84%) of the total. Globacom followed with 21.00 per cent, whilst Airtel was third most dominant at 20.48 per cent and Etisalat was fourth with 15.69 per cent.

Since May of 2014, monthly growth in GSM subscribers has averaged 0.95 per cent, with the greatest increase being recorded in December of 2014 at 1.97 per cent and the lowest in July of the same year at -0.43 per cent. The growth in subscribers was mainly driven by Globacom, which recorded an average rate of 1.45 per cent over the period, followed by Etisalat with 1.37 per cent and Airtel with 1.29 per cent, whilst MTN recorded the lowest average monthly growth in subscribers at 0.44 per cent.

Fixed Wireless Line 

The fixed wireless line market is also dominated by Visafone, with 55,244 (92.26%) of the 59,881 subscribers using this network as of April of 2015. The remaining 4,637 (7.74%) were held by Multilinks.    Growth in the fixed wireless technology subsector was negative over the period. From the 60,978 subscribers recorded in May of 2014, there was a decline of 1,097 subscribers (1.80%) to the 59,881 subscribers recorded in April of 2015.

The average monthly growth rate totaled -0.12 per cent over the period, with Multilinks again driving the negative average of -7.00 per cent, whilst Visafone had a positive rate of 0.87 per cent.

  Fixed Wired Line

A total of 124,909 lines were registered with fixed wired technology as of April of 2015, across the four networks of 21st Century, ipNX, Glo Fixed and MTN Fixed. The market was dominated by 21st Century, with 99,484 lines (79.65%) of the total subscribers. Glo and MTN, which had 11,834 lines (9.47%) of the total and 10,995 lines (8.80%) of the total respectively, followed this. The smallest share was held by ipNX, with 2,596 lines (2.08%) of the total.

Telephone Traffic for Mobile Operators

The report shows that the 32,216.27 million minutes of outgoing calls made in 2014 alone translated to 22.37 million days, 3.20 million weeks and 61,294 years of calls made. The duration per person was 230 minutes for outgoing calls in 2014, meaning that on average, throughout the year, each person spent 3.84 hours on the telephone on outgoing calls.

Local and national traffic in minutes

Of the four network carriers of MTN, GLO, Airtel and EMTS, the greatest telephone traffic was recorded for MTN in 2014, with 10,074.00 million minutes of outgoing calls, making up 31.27 per cent of the total and 1,699.00 million (48.11%0 of all outgoing calls. The fastest growth in traffic was recorded for MTN in 2012, in which the duration of outgoing calls increased from 6,830.85 million by 549.64% to 44,375.77 million minutes.

International Telephone Traffic in minutes

SMS Messages    Mobile SMS Messages have been increasing rapidly between the 2010-2014 period. In 2010, a total of 871.98 million messages were sent, whilst 875.12 million were received across all four network carriers of MTN, GLO, Airtel and EMTS. Annual growth thereafter averaged 36.87% for outgoing messages and 35.69% for incoming messages over the period.

The year 2014 saw rapid growth in both sent and received messages, increasing by 707.70 million or 45.52% and 720.20 million or 39.17% for sent and received messages respectively, bringing the 2014 sent message total to 2,262.72 million messages and the received message total to 2,560.62 million.

Text Messages Sent and Received in 2014 by Network Carrier Of the network carriers, MTN sent and received the greatest number of SMS messages in all years of review, with 739.00 million or 32.66% of all sent messages and 1,125.00 million (43.93%) of all received messages in 2014. This was followed by Airtel, in which 577.59 million messages 25.53%0 of the total were sent in 2014 and 378.92 million messages (28.86%) of the total were received in the same year.

Internet Subscribers growth (GSM)

Between April of 2014 and May of 2015, monthly growth in internet subscriptions averaged 2.36 percent. All companies exhibited strong growth, although the main driver was globacom, with an average of 539,034 additional subscribers each month, a rate of 3.39 per cent.