Telecoms sector employs 419 expatriates as workforce hits 15,507

MNOs exchange 2.56m subscribers via number portability in nine years
Licensees in Nigeria’s $75.6 billion telecoms sector have directly employed 15,507 workers as of December 2022, with 419 of these being expatriates.

Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), which revealed this, aggregated the work forces under GSM, fixed operators, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Value Added Service (VAS), Collocation and Infrastructure (C&I) providers and other segments.

Specifically, GSM operators, which include MTN, Globacom, Airtel and 9mobile, employed 7,451 employees; fixed operators, 260; ISPs, 4,481; VAS, 560; C&I, 1,762, while other players employed 993 in the last two decades of the telecoms revolution in Nigeria.

The data, which is contained in the 2022 Subscriber/Network Data Yearly report, further revealed that mobile network operators, which employed 4,735 males and 2,535 females, had, as of December 2022, 181 expatriates (177 males and four females). Fixed telephone operators (21stCentury, ipNX, Swift, etc) had 174 males and 86 females with 86 expatriate staff.

The ISPs, including Spectranet, Cyberspace, Tizeti, MainOne, employed 3,427 males; 1,054 females and 51 expatriate workers. C&I players, including IHS, ATC and others, had 1,395 male workers and 314 women with 53 expatriates. VAS operators, on the other hand, had 385 males; 166 females and nine expatriates.

According to NCC, other telecoms operators employed 757 males, 197 females and had 39 expatriates.

Further analysis of the report showed that the quartet of MTN, Globacom, Airtel and 9mobile explored the Number Portability scheme to exchange quantum numbers of subscribers since inception of the scheme in Nigeria.

The Guardian recalled that Mobile Number Portability (MNP) was launched in Nigeria on April 22, 2013.

According to NCC, from May 2013 to December 2022, 9mobile had the highest count of port-in subscribers (676,944), while Airtel, MTN and GLO, respectively, had: 331,837, 181,301 and 105,746.

Similarly, the analysis from May 2013 to December 2022 revealed that MTN had the highest number of subscribers that ported-out (444,226) to other networks, while Airtel, GLO and & 9mobile have: 351,422, 277,527 and 190,742), respectively.