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By Nwakaego Alajemba
With market increasingly getting more data-centric, MTN Nigeria has seen steady rise in capital expenditure (CAPEX) on enhancing its data nodes as are its competitors.
“In 2018, we earmarked N180 billion on CAPEX, and a large chunk of the 2018 budget was directed to network expansion, upgrade and optimisation to meet the growing demand of our subscribers for data services,” said General Manager, Corporate Treasury Finances at MTN, Mr. Ishmael Nwokocha during a recent public engagement in Lagos on the network’s roll out strategy for Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology where it also announced securing a N200 billion loan facility from 12 banks for network expansion.
MTN is Nigeria’s largest network operator with about 50 million subscribers and it also leads the mobile internet market as it accounts for over 40% of the market.
“We are currently experiencing more demand for data services from social media like WhatsApp. As we transit from call-centric to data-centric, we need to improve our infrastructure for data service offering, and we have to prepare for the future, if a large part of our revenue will be coming from data,” said Nwokocha.
Nigeria mobile market is expected to make a final turn of being over 80% data driven in the next few years as apps and platforms become the bedrock of global communication services.
