Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Nigeria’s telecommunications sector witnessed a decline of $525.4bn in 2020.
This was disclosed by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), in the 2020 Subscriber/Network Data Report released on Wednesday.
Making reference to data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), NCC said FDI into the Nigerian telecoms industry in 2020, stood at $417. 5 billion, a decline from $942.9 billion recorded in 2019.
Statistics by the NCC also showed that in 2020, mobile network operators (MNOs) earned N2.26 trillion as against N2.019 trillion recorded in 2019. This reflected an increase of 12.33 per cent of total revenue from the network operators.
MNOs’ operating costs also dropped from N1.415 trillion in 2019 to N1.395 trillion a year after, a slight decline of 1.46 per cent from the figures reported in 2019.
The NCC attributed the reduction in operating costs to more efficient CAPEX.
The report showed that as of 2020, total outgoing local and national traffic was 150,825,830,687.40 minutes, while total incoming calls were 151,871,687,402.67 minutes.
MTN had the highest total outgoing and incoming traffic of 103,531,547,686 and 105,473,566,557 minutes respectively in 2020.
Total outgoing mobile international traffic was 453,202,089.27 minutes, while incoming to mobile was 717,166,679.72. MTN also reported the highest outgoing traffic of 270,177,167 and the highest incoming traffic of 264,977,868.6 for the period under review.
For Short Messages Sent (SMS), NCC put the total national SMS both sent and received as of December 2020 at 17,364,524,490.02, a decline of (43.6 per cent) from that of the total SMS sent and received in the year 2019 that stood at 30,769,238,164.56 SMS.
There was a 29.4 per cent increase in the number of messages sent out in the year 2020 compared to 2019. Conversely, the year 2020 count of incoming SMS declined by 62.6 per cent higher than that of 2019. MTN also recorded the highest count of SMS received (6,290,889,268) in 2020, the highest count of SMS sent (6,100,543,865) within the period under review.
The total number of international SMS sent as of December 2020 was 57,566,961 while the total number of SMS received was 229,173,132.
NCC said the global pandemic altered the way and manner business activities were hitherto carried out globally.
It said 2020 witnessed a significant surge in data usage that may have reflected the industry performance for the year, which challenged the global telecoms industry generally and Nigerians particularly.
The telecoms regulator informed that the number of Internet subscribers increased from 135.7 million as of March 2020 to 154,437,623 Subscriptions as of November 2020 representing an increase of 13.77 per cent and that data usage also increased from 147,537.52TB to 196,163.42TB within the same period while broadband penetration continued to increase within the year 2020 reaching a peak of 45.93 per cent.
