The Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA) has recently released its Communication Statistics for Q2 2023 which provide information on the performance of the telecom sector.
Telecom Subscriptions
TCRA indicate that in June 2023 the number of telecom subscriptions (all active SIM cards) reached 64.1 million.
On average, this is an increase of 1.5% from April to June 2023 compared to an average increase of 0.59% in every month of the last quarter.
Mobile subscriptions represented 99.87% of all subscriptions.
The fourth quarter of 2022/2023 saw a significant increase in subscriptions compared to the third quarter which had an additional 1.6 million SM cards compared to 2.2 million additional SIM cards for this quarter.
The reason for the increase is associated with the re-registration of barred SIM cards of the last quarter because of not being verified. The increase might also be associated with increased use of digital services.
None of the six mobile operators active in Tanzania has a market share greater than 35% which is a minimum significant level. “This signifies that there is healthy competition among the operators in the telecommunication sub-sector,” TCRA explains.
Mobile Operators Subscriptions Market Shares
Mobile Money Subscriptions
Mobile money subscription has increased from 44.4 million accounts in the quarter ending March 2023 to 47.3 million accounts in June 2023 (+6.5%).
Vodacom has the larger market share of 36% of mobile money accounts in the market, followed by Tigo with 31%, Airtel with 22%, Halotel with 8%, and TTCL with 3%.
Mobile money transactions reached 420,675,884 in June 2023.
In this report, TCRA did not disclose the value of mobile money transactions, which were TZS 13,9 trillion in December 2023 and reached TZS 140.9 trillion in 2022.
Mobile Money Operators Market Share June 2023
Internet Subscriptions
Total internet subscriptions reached 34,045,384 in June 20233 from 33,090,834 in March 2023.
Mobile wireless accounted for 99.7% of all internet subscriptions, followed by fixed wired, and fixed wireless.
Tanzania Internet Subscriptions 2018-June 2023
During the quarter ending June 2023, the service that used more bandwidth (in GBs) was YouTube with a total of 50.18 million GBs because video streaming services consumed more bandwidth than other services.
The second was Facebook with 49.49 million GBs mostly due to video services.
Third was the video hosting service TikTok with 33.57 million GBs.
In Q1 2023, WhatsApp was the 3rd social media that used the most bandwidth, followed by TikTok.
Total Bandwidth (in GB) Used in Social Media in Q2 2023
