5 Stats about MTN’s data usage that every internet business should know

Statistics and data are about the hardest things to come by in Nigeria, And it gets even harder to find data when it pertains to a highly competitive Industry like Telecommunications. In fact, asides for the Stats the NCC puts up periodically, you will be hard pressed to find anything else about that sector any where.

One of my hobbies is looking at financial/earnings reports and trying to make sense of the numbers, for my own amusement. Such reports usually do contain some nuggets of priceless information which you wouldn’t readily find elsewhere.

I bumped into some interesting data while looking at MTN Group’s financial report for 2013 earlier in the year and somehow it skipped my mind to share here, till I looked at their quarterly report for the first quarter of 2014. Here are a few nuggets from both reports:

• The average data usage per customer on MTN is 41MB per month.
• The number of 3G enabled devices on MTN (as at March 2014) stand at 7.1 million, up from 6.5 million in December last year.
• Of the 6.5 million 3G enabled devices last year, only 216,000 were dongles.
• Data revenue contributed 15.1% of MTN Nigeria’s revenue for 2013. Data revenue for the first quarter of this year is up by 21.1% compared with the same period for last year.
• MTN now has 58.4million subscribers, representing 49.5% marketshare.

The last data point is really important because it means that MTN’s subscriber base is a large enough sample to be representative of the whole market.

There are lots of talking points and a lot of results you can extrapolate from these 5 points especially if you are an internet startup, but I will let you come to your own conclusions on them.