Nigeria expected to gain 45m mobile subscribers in five years:

Business Monitor predicts that Nigeria could add around 45 million new mobile subscribers in the next five years.

In its new Nigeria Telecommunications Report, Business Monitor says after a wave of regulatory penalties, including fines and a ban on promotions, Nigeria’s mobile operators have announced plans to expand and upgrade their networks to cope with strong subscriptions growth and increasing data usage. Business Monitor expects this trend to continue over the medium term.  

Meanwhile, consolidation and, subsequently, transition to LTE technology appears to be a growing trend among tier two telecoms service providers in Nigeria. Business Monitor sees this as a positive development as, through consolidation, tier-two operators are able to gain scale for bigger network deployments while the transition to LTE should enable them to compete better with 3G HSPA+ offerings from the GSM operators.

The report notes that mobile subscription growth slowed to 2.7% quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q) in Q213 due to the large net loss reported by third largest operator Airtel. Mobile ARPU decline accelerated in Q213 due to the impact of cuts to mobile termination rates in April 2013, with market leader MTN's ARPU down 22.6% year-on-year and the fixed-line sector contracted by 5.7% in Q113 and 27.6% in the 12 months to June 2013.