MTN Nigeria says it has fully barred a total of 8.6 million lines from the network in line with the directive of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on SIMs not linked to the National Identification Number (NIN) of the users.
The company disclosed this in its first quarter (Q1) 2024 financial report, noting that this impacted its business in the quarter.
However, to provide more time for the subscribers with less than five lines linked to an unverified NIN to complete the necessary verification exercise, MTN disclosed that the NCC has extended the 15 April deadline to 31 July 2024.
According to MTN, the lines that have been fully barred are those of subscribers who did not submit their NIN and those with more than five lines linked to an unverified NIN.
Highlighting the impact of the NIN-SIM linkage exercise and the regulatory directive, MTN Nigeria’s CEO, Karl Toriola, said:
Toriola said this demonstrated the effectiveness of the company’s customer value management (CVM) initiatives, which helped it to retain affected customers and reduce churn, as well as to drive gross connections.
Meanwhile, the company also reported a decline in its data subscribers in the quarter under review. According to the MTN’s CEO, active data subscribers declined marginally by approximately 78,000 to 44.5 million.
Data from the NCC show that total active mobile subscriptions in Nigeria across the networks of MTN, Airtel, Globacom and 9mobile, which stood at 224.4 million in December 2023 had declined to 219 million as of March 2024 as all the telecom operators implemented the policy on the mandatory NIN-SIM linkage.