MTN Nigeria has disconnected 4.2 million lines from its network.
This followed the expiration of the February 28 deadline given by the federal government for the linking of National Identification Numbers (NIN) with mobile SIMs lapsed.
The company said the lines disconnected were those for which the subscribers did not submit their NIN. MTN disclosed this in its audited financial results released on Friday.
According to the company, since December 2023 when NCC issued an industry-wide directive requiring full barring of subscriber lines not linked to their NIN, it had subjected a total of 19 million lines to verification.
Out of these, it said 4.3 million have been verified and 4.2 million disconnected as of 28 February 2024.
The company, however, noted that the disconnected lines would not affect its revenue as the users were of low value.
“Several of these lines were low-value subscribers, minimizing the revenue impact. We are actively engaging the authorities to accelerate the NIN verification process.
“We have also increased our engagement with the affected customers, providing various channels for verification to minimize service disruption,” MTN stated.
Commenting on the company’s performance in 2023, MTN Nigeria’s CEO, Karl Toriola, said the company maintained strong commercial momentum in its connectivity business and platforms, supported by the growth in the user base.
“We added over 4 million subscribers in 2023, bringing our total base to 79.7 million. We also increased our data subscribers by over 5 million to 44.6 million, which helped to drive total data traffic growth of 44.9%.
“This reflected the sustained growth in demand for data, supported by our compelling propositions to customers and the consistent investment in the quality and coverage of our network.
“The additional 2600MHz spectrum we acquired in September 2023 also helped us to deploy additional capacity to our network more efficiently,” Toriola said.