The tremendous increase in data consumption by Nigerians is bridging the gap incurred by the decreasing voice revenue for telecommunication operators as seen in their latest quarterly financial result.
About the report
According to the recently released financial results by Mtn Nigeria and Airtel Africa, it was seen that Data is fast rising in terms of revenue generated whereas voice which used to generate major revenue for the telecom operators has decreased tremendously. For instance, in the last 9-month of 2022, Mtn recorded a growth of 49.1% to N549.6 billion in Data revenue while voice revenue increased by 4.4% to N753.7 billion. Airtel also recorded a 26.7% growth in data revenue compared with an 11.9% growth in voice revenue for the last 9-month of 2022.
According to the report, data usage per customer jumped to 8.3 GB in a month compared with 5.4 GB recorded in the previous year and it was seen that 4G data has been the sole contributor to this change by 79.5%.
The chief Executive officer of Mtn Nigeria, Mr. Karl Toriola said: “The contribution of voice to total revenue has been dropping while the contribution of data has been going up. So, we will see their convergence soon. We expect that data will overtake voice at some point soon. As of April 2017, voice contribution was 70%, but today, it has dropped. In the next 2-4 years, data will overtake voice in terms of revenue contribution and this will be driven by factors such as the increase in smartphone penetration and the uptake of 5G”,
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A telecom expert, Mr. Adewale Adeoye attributed the changes to the growing E-commerce in the country as many people are buying things on the internet rather than going to a physical shop, the use of social media like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and so on by Nigerians and many other online learning platforms and video coverage tools like zoom as they all consume lots of data.
