Nigeria’s telecom industry attracted $399m as foreign investment in 2022 — down by 46.9%

The Nigerian telecommunications industry generated $399.9 million as foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2022, according to data obtained from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

This figure represents a decrease of $353.1 million (46.9 percent), relative to the foreign investment of $753 million recorded in 2021.

The NCC disclosed this in its latest ‘2022 Subscriber/Network Data Annual Report’.

The commission said based on the responsive service providers such as MTN, Airtel, and Globacom, the industry had a capital expenditure or domestic investment of N785.77 billion, an operating cost of N2.092 billion, and a revenue of N3.85 billion as at December 2022.

NBS also said the telecoms industry contributed 13.55 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2022, compared to the 12.61 percent made in the corresponding quarter of the previous year.

In terms of the number of subscribers, the commission said it recorded a total of 222,571,568 active voice subscriptions at the end of 2022.

This is an increase of 27,107, 670 (13.86 percent) subscriptions compared to the 2021 record (195,463,898).

NIGERIANS EXCHANGED 25.9 BILLION TEXT MESSAGES

The NBS report disclosed that Nigerians exchanged 25.93 billion text messages locally in 2022.

Giving a breakdown, it said 14.09 billion SMS messages were sent, and about 11.84 billion were received.

“The total number of national SMS both sent and received as at December 2022 was 25,928,704,567,” the NBS said.

“This is an increase of 28.82 percent from that of the total SMS sent and received in the year 2021 which stood at 20,126,551,822 SMS.

“There was a 48.84 percent increase in the number of SMS sent in 2022 compared to 2021. Conversely, the year 2022 count of received SMS also increased by 11.06 percent higher than that of 2021.

“In the year 2022, MTN recorded the highest count of SMS received and sent which stood at 8,738,690,150 and 8,323,722,485, respectively.”

For international SMS, over 59,571,547 were sent as at December 2022, while the total number of SMS received was 459,329,782, the commission added.