MTN closes 3.4 million inactive lines

MTN Group has redefined who an active subscriber is and that has led to MTN Ghana deleting a whopping 3.4 million inactive lines from its network in the first quarter of 2017 alone. Within the same quarter, however, MTN Ghana gained over 800,000 new active customers, and the net effect is a drop in subscriber base by 2.5 million, leaving the telecom leader with 16.9 million plus active voice subscribers, according to the National Communications Authority’s 90 day voice subscription reporting ending of April 30, 2017. On the data front, the country realized a total of 19,697,062 subscribers in February, before MTN deleted the lines; and after the deactivation, it still increased to 21,584,899 in April.

Impact on penetration- So with the huge drop in MTN’s active subscribers, general mobile cellular subscriptions, which was 39,234,216 in February 2017, dropped to 35,780,667 in March, and increased slightly to 35,984,280 in April. As a result, between February and April, cellular penetration has dropped from 139 per cent plus, to 127 per cent at the end of April 2017. That is a 12 percentage point drop. MTN’s own voice market share has also dropped from 51.65% to 47.16%, but it still maintained its comfortable lead on the local market. Its data subscribers has however increased from 11 million plus to over 12 million within the period.

MTN explains- Corporate Services Executive of MTN Ghana, Cynthia Lumor has been explaining to Adom News that the group redefined an active subscriber to exclude numbers that only subscribe to value added services (VAS) but could not be billed because for months there is no airtime on those numbers to allow billing. “Those lines had for many months not generated any revenue for company but remained on the rework and were counted as active subscriptions because initially we were billing them for the VAS subscription on them. “But over time the billing for the VAS subscriptions has been 0.00 consistently so per our new definition of who a revenue-generating subscriber is, we have had to remove those numbers from our network and start the process of reassigning the numbers,” she said.

Reporting and verification- Telcos have often been accused of keeping and counting millions of inactive numbers on their networks just to shore up their subscription levels for marketing purposes. The NCA has always claimed it verifies the figures telcos report to ensure they only report active and revenue generating numbers. But this one-act by MTN raises questions as whether all other telcos are actually reporting only active revenue generating numbers or they keep throwing in inactive numbers to create the wrong impression about the actual cellular penetration level in the country. It also raises questions as to what kind of verification the NCA does before publishing the figures telcos report.