Telecommunications firm, MTN has disclosed that following the December 2023 directive of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for telecoms operators to disconnect unlinked SIMs to NIN, it discovered that 19 million needed verifications.

By the February 28 deadline, MTN said it had verified 4.3 million telephone lines. The firm disclosed this in its Audited Financial results for the year ended December 31, 2023.

In the financial report released Friday, March 1, the firm said: We also had approximately 4.2 million lines disconnected for which subscribers did not submit their NIN. 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.

Commenting on the companys performance in 2023, MTN Nigerias 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 five million to 44.6 million, which helped to drive total data traffic growth of 44.9 per cent.

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.

Meanwhile, the instability of the Naira impacted the telecommunications earnings, which resulted in a loss of about N740 billion in 2023 up from N81 billion in 2022 to foreign exchange crises in the country.

MTN said its financial result has been negatively affected by the sharp devaluation in the naira against the US dollar impacting its financials, despite the operating companys solid underlying operational performance.

This mainly drove higher operating and net finance costs for MTN Nigeria, which are expected to affect the groups full-year financial performance. The foreign exchange losses in MTN Nigerias financial results are estimated to be 593c in the group full-year results.(The Guardian)