Glo subscriber base jumps by 24% plus after migrating to AirtelTigo
The latest mobile voice subscription numbers published by the National Communications Authority (NCA) indicates that as at the end of June 2022, Glo Ghana witnessed a significant 24.64% increase in subscriptions over that of May 2022.
Per the numbers, voice subscriptions of Glo increased from 794,288 as at the end of May 2022 to 989,965 at the end of June 2022. This also means, against the overall voice subscriptions of about 41 million in Ghana, Glo’s market share for the month under review was 2.42%.
Glo also recorded data subscription figures of 244,109 at the end of June 2022, which reflects a market share of 1.04%
This is the first time Glo has seen such a huge increase in the number of active subscriptions and also crossed 2% market share in many years, and it is happening just over two months after Glo had migrated all of its customers to the AirtelTigo platform.
On its own network, which restricted coverage to a limited number of communities in the country, Glo for many years experienced consistent decrease in the number of subscriptions. The network took off in Ghana with over 1.5 million subscribers and it dropped all the way down to around 700,000.
Glo’s Group Chairman was happy to migrate subscribers to AirtelTigo because he is allegedly in the process of striking a deal with the government of Ghana to combine Glo, AirtelTigo and possibly Ghana Telecom (Vodafone) to form one entity to compete with the overwhelming market leader, MTN, in a duopoly.
But as Glo is gaining subscriptions and market share, its new host, AirtelTigo is not doing too well.
Per the same report, AirtelTigo’s voice subscription level dropped by 2.17% from 6.98 million in May 2022 to 6.83 million in June, resulting in a loss of market share from 17.04% to 16.66% over the same period.
AirtelTigo’s mobile data subscriptions for June 2022 was 3,132,519, and the market
share there was 13.29% for the period under review.
The other loser in the house is the telco which is now for sale, Vodafone, which lost more than 100,000 subscriptions from 7.44 million in May to 7.32 million in June, a percentage decrease of 1.53%.
Indeed, Vodafone also lost market share marginally from over 18% to 17.87%. Its data subscriptions for the period stood at about 3.2 million, reflecting a 13.52% data market share.
This happening to Vodafone even upon rolling out free money transfer on Vodafone Cash, which drove it to a weak number two in term of number of mobile money transactions.
The overwhelming market leader and only SMP (significant market power) MTN continued to increase subscriptions and market share as always.
MTN’s voice subscriptions for the period was 25.85 million, representing a percentage
increase of 0.42% over that of May, shooting its market share to 63.06%.
MTN also ended the month of June with a little over 17 million mobile data subscriptions, representing a huge market share of 72.16%.
The significance of MTN’s continuous growth lies in the fact that this is happening even at a time when a number of regulatory measures have been implemented to curtail MTN’s growth and allow the smaller telcos to catch up, but they are obviously not catching up.
Industry experts have said that to the extent that the regulatory measures does not include stopping MTN from selling SIM cards and stopping the lead tower co-location company, ATC Ghana from maintaining an unfair lease-back agreement with MTN, the telco will continue to have significant advantage over competition no matter what corrective measures the regulator implements.
MTN on its own, is implementing a strategy to eventually become a platform player, which includes becoming a Network as a Service (NaaS) to carry the entire ecosystem along on the path of growth. That strategy alone, dubbed Agenda 2025, seem to have made the SMP corrective measures of no effect on MTN’s growth.
Indeed, it gives credence to the expert assertions that MTN Ghana is outgrowing, if not outgrown, existing regulations, and the regulator needs to catch up.
Meanwhile, at the end of June 2022, the total number of voice subscriptions was 40,988,879. This represents a percentage increase of 0.10% from May 2022 and represents a total penetration rate of 130.37%, against an estimated population of 31,439,251.
On the data side, the total subscriptions, including that of BWAs, for the period under review stood at 23,723,582. The penetration rate for the period stood at 75.46%.
But without the BWAs, just the four telcos – AirtelTigo, Glo, MTN and Vodafone accounted for 23,577,601 data subscription, representing a penetration of of 74.99%.
