In Ghana, the SIM card re-registration campaign causes MTN to lose 6.3% of its mobile subscribers in 2023

March 4th 2024

Africa, MTN, network, Sim Registration

MTN Ghana’s mobile subscriber base declined by 6.3% year-on-year to 26.8 million in 2023, according to the mobile phone company’s latest annual report. The Ghanaian subsidiary of the South African group MTN considers this drop as a consequence of the end of the national SIM card re-registration campaign which saw telecom operators disconnect subscribers who were not in good standing from their networks.

MTN Ghana says it blocked 5.4 million SIMs that were not registered with the Ghana Card as of May 31, 2023. “  Since then, 0.6 million SIM cards from the blocked cohort have been re-registered, bringing the number total disconnected SIM cards to 4.8 million at the end of December 2023  ,” specifies the company.

Despite this decline, MTN Ghana was able to record a turnover of 13.3 billion cedis ($1.05 billion), up 34.6% compared to 9.9 billion cedis in 2022. This performance positive was supported by the growth of the main business segments.

Voice services revenue increased by 9.0% to GHS 3.6 billion. The number of active data subscribers increased by 14% to 15.4 million, while data segment revenue increased by 50.9% to GHS5.8 billion. . The number of active mobile money (MoMo) users increased by 20.1% to 15.2 million with a total revenue of GHS2.9 million.

Remember that this drop in the number of subscribers could affect the structure of the telecoms market. As of March 31, 2023, MTN had a 66.72% share of the mobile phone market, compared to 18.43% for Vodafone Ghana (Telecel) and 14.85% for AirtelTigo (now AT).

Source: Agency EcoFin

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