Nigeria’s Telecoms Industry Attracted $339 Million As FDI in 2022 - NCC

The Nigerian Communication Commission through its data collated has announced that the Nigerian telecommunications industry gained $399.9 million in foreign direct investment (FDI) during the complete cycle of 2022. 

The earnings come with a significant decline as of the previous year (2021). The drop witnessed was $353.1 million which represented a 46.9% decline—the FDI record of 2021 was $753 million.

This breakdown was revealed in the NCC '2022 Subscriber/Network Data Annual Report'. It was also revealed that the biggest Telecoms industry in Nigeria, which are MTN, Airtel, and Globacom recorded domestic investment of N785.77 billion in capital expenditure, N3.85 billion in revenue, and N2.092 billion in operation costs as of December 2022.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBC) said that the telecoms sectors contributed 13.55% to Nigeria's GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the fourth quarter of 2022. It was also noticed that there was an increase from the 12.61% recorded in the same quarter of 2021.

The total number of active Voice subscribers according to the NCC stands for 222,571,568 subscriptions at the close of 2022 which indicated an increase of 27,107,670 subscriptions or 13.86% when compared to the records of 2021 which stood at 195,463,898.

Also in the NCC report, text messaging data showed that a total of 25.93 billion messages were sent in 2022. The breakdown shows that 14.09 billion messages were sent, while a total of 11.84 billion messages were received.

The NBS stated,

• The total number of national SMS both sent and received as at December 2022 was 25,928,704,567

• 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.

With all these notated, the NBS also recorded that in December 2022, international messages sent stood at 59,571,547, while international messages received were 459,329,782.