Customers of Airtel Nigeria spent a total of N304 billion (($734 million) to buy data from the Mobile Network Operator within a 12-month period.
According to the Financial report for the Full Year ended March 2022 filed by its Parent Company, Airtel Africa, at the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX), average data consumption by its customers also doubled in the year compared to the previous year.
This revved up data revenue for Airtel Nigeria by 41.1% compared to N227.4 billion (($549 million) the company recorded in the same period last year.
Airtel disclosed that data usage per customer on the network jumped from 2.8GB per month in the previous year to 4.0GB per month this year.
This shows that the rate of data consumption by Nigerians has increased over the last year. The telco also said its data customer base grew by 14.9 per cent while data Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) grew by 37.6%.
The 41% growth in Airtel’s data revenue dwarfed the 15.9 per cent voice revenue growth the company recorded in the year.
Remarks
Commenting on the data revenue and usage growth, Airtel said: “Our continued 4G network expansion and increased smartphone penetration has supported data usage growth. Almost 99% of our sites in Nigeria are now delivering 4G, and smartphone penetration of our customers has increased by almost 1 percentage point.”
Data revenue accounted for 39.1 per cent of total revenue in Nigeria in the year, up by 3.7 per cent on the prior year. For Q4’22, 43.6 per cent of our data customer base were 4G users, contributing to 76.0 per cent of total data usage. Data usage per customer reached 4.2 GB per month and 4G data usage per customer reached 6.5 GB per month, a significant increase on the 4.6 GB usage per customer per month of Q4’21,” the company added.
Reasons for the Surge
Data consumption across all sectors has been on the rise since as technology provides various channels and applications to subscribers to achieve various goals. All they have to do is have data on their telephone lines.
It is also clear data has remained an enabler of the new normal imposed by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 which led to remote work culture.
Also, the proliferation of Over-the-Top Services (OTTs) such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Wechat, Telegram, among others, through which subscribers can also make voice and video calls using their data subscriptions, is driving the surge in data usage in Nigeria at the expense of voice calls.
The rising number of subscribers alongside that the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is also a good a good justification for the rise in data revenue for telecoms operators.
