Nigerians spend averagely N3,607/month on telephone as the telecommunications landscape may have officially shifted from a volume game to a value goldmine.

This is driven by an insatiable appetite for short-form video and the long-awaited tariff reset of early 2025, as industry leaders, MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria, reported a surge in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

The audited December 2025 financials revealed a definitive end to the industry’s ‘lost year’ of 2024. As TikTok and YouTube consumption hit record highs, these two successfully converted massive data traffic into a combined revenue powerhouse, signalling that while Nigerians may be talking less, they are streaming and paying more than ever before.

These financial reports showed a massive shift in consumer behaviour and a strategic pivot toward 4G and 5G data services; both networks are now extracting significantly more value from every active SIM card on their networks.

Specifically, MTN Nigeria’s 2025 performance marked a complete structural transformation. The company reported a staggering 55 per cent surge in total revenue, hitting N5.20 trillion for the full year.

The highlight of the report is the ARPU growth, which stabilised at approximately $3.02 (approx. N4,200) per month. This represents a 38.6 per cent increase compared to the previous year. For the first time in the company’s history, data revenue (N2.78 trillion) has dethroned voice revenue (N1.85 trillion) as the primary engine of the business.

For emphasis, ARPU is a non-GAAP metric commonly used by digital media, social media, and telecommunications companies to assess their revenue-generating capabilities at the per-customer level.

Indeed, key metrics from the MTN’s results showed that on data consumption, average monthly usage per customer hit 13.1 GB. This prompted the firm’s profit to move from a 2024 loss to a N1.11 trillion profit After Tax a year later.

For the purposes of context, The Guardian checks showed that as of December 2025, Nigeria finished the year with 179.6 million active telephone users with 82.8 per cent teledensity. Internet users across the networks were 148 million, while broadband services reached 113 million people with 52 per cent penetration.

While data consumption for December 2025 was 1,386,238.23 terabytes, Nigerians, however, consumed 13.25 million terabytes in the whole of last year as against 9.76 million terabytes in 2024.