Customers of the big four telecom operators in the country spent about N9 trillion on airtime for their voice calls and data in 2025, pushing up telecom operators’ revenue in the last financial year.
MTN Nigeria got about N5.3 trillion in total revenue from their 90.3 million customers’ airtime purchase for the year ended December 31, 2025. This pushed them back to record a profit after tax of N1.11 trillion.
Airtel Nigeria earned about N3.1 trillion in revenue from airtime sales from their 60.9 million customers, with data revenue marking rapid growth as smartphone adoption and internet penetration continue to rise across its network.
Though Globacom and T2/9mobile have not been publishing their detailed public financials, industry analysts and analysis done by Akelicious estimated their combined revenue from airtime to be close to N2 trillion for 2025. Globacom has about 22.3 million customers while T2 mobile has 3.3 million customers.
The increase in airtime earnings was due to the sharp rise in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) recorded by the operators, according to some of their financial results and data by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
ARPU, a key telecom industry metric, measures the average amount each subscriber spends monthly on telecom services such as voice, data and digital products.
Akelicious learnt that the rise in consumers’ spending was also driven by the combined impact of tariff adjustments and rising data consumption.
The full-year financial results released by MTN Nigeria showed that monthly ARPU rose to $3.60 in 2025 from $2.17 in 2024. If this is converted into the local currency, Naira, the company’s ARPU increased to N5,184.01 from N3,542.00.
This means that each customer on the network was spending an average of N5,184.01 per month in 2025.
This pushed the company’s revenue for the year to N5.2 trillion, a 55.1% increase when compared with the N3.3 trillion it recorded in 2024.
MTN disclosed that the number of active data subscribers grew by 11.6%, while smartphone penetration increased by 7.9 percentage points to 66.1%.
The company also recorded a 34% increase in data traffic, while average usage per subscriber rose by 20% to 13.1GB monthly, all of which boosted its ARPU.
In addition, MTN expanded its 4G population coverage by 2.1 percentage points to 84.6%, driven by accelerated investments in network infrastructure and service quality improvements.
As for Airtel Nigeria, monthly ARPU climbed to $2.4 in 2025 (full financial year ended March 31, 2026) from $1.7 in 2024.
In naira terms, the figure increased to N3,326.4 from N2,599.3. Despite the increase, an average customer on Airtel spends less monthly compared with MTN.
Airtel reported that its revenue grew by 47.4% in constant currency, largely driven by continued strength in the demand for data services and supported by tariff adjustments.
“In reported currency, revenue grew by 52.8% to $1,598m with Q4’26 revenue growth at 54.7% (40.2% in constant currency).
“The constant currency revenue growth was driven by ARPU growth of 36.7% and customer base growth of 9.4%,” the company stated.
The company’s data revenue increased by 63.6%, supported by growth in both data customers and data ARPU.
Airtel said data customer growth stood at 8.1%, while data ARPU expanded by 49.2% during the year.
Airtel Nigeria also recorded a significant rise in internet consumption, with average data usage per customer increasing by 30.8% to 11GB monthly from 8.4GB recorded in the previous year.
The increase in customer spending followed the implementation of the 50% telecom tariff adjustment approved by the NCC early last year, which raised the prices of voice calls, SMS and data bundles across the industry.
With the increment, the cost of an SMS, which stood at N4.00 for several years, was increased to N6.00, while voice call and data tariffs were also increased accordingly.
But the growing data consumption among Nigerians was identified as a major factor in lifting telecom revenues and subscriber spending.
According to the NCC, data consumption in Nigeria has been growing at an unprecedented level between last year and this year.