T2 Mobile, formerly known as 9mobile, has stemmed its subscriber loss but has seen its growth stall.
A year after its August 2025 rebrand, it accounts for 3.6 million lines in Nigeria’s mobile market. In September 2026, it added no new subscribers, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), and has stayed stagnant since July.
In September, the industry added 2.93 million lines. MTN saw 2.09 million new lines, Airtel 619,000 and Globacom 218,000. T2 was the only operator that did not see any additions.
Before the rebrand, T2’s active user base fell to 2.44 million in June 2025. By September 2025, it had recovered to 3.11 million. NCC data shows T2 at 3.5 million lines in May 2026 and 3.61 million in September, a 3% growth rate in four months. Over the same period, industry lines rose 5.7% from 189.4 million to 200.1 million.
That poor performance has seen its share of the market fall from about 1.85% in May to 1.81% in September.
Read: MTN, Airtel, Glo and T2 Mobile take House of Representatives to court over CEO summonses
What the rebrand was meant to fix
The company has gone by three names since it launched in 2008 as Etisalat Nigeria. Its financial problems began in 2013, when it took a $1.2 billion syndicated loan from 13 Nigerian banks to fund network expansion.
A recession, falling naira value, and rising costs made the debt hard to service. In 2017, Etisalat’s UAE parent withdrew its shareholding and told the company to drop the Etisalat name. It became 9mobile in July of that year.
Its latest owner is Lighthouse Telecoms, led by chairman Thomas Etuh. The NCC approved the takeover in July 2024, with a promised $3 billion investment over four years. In August 2025, 9mobile rebranded as T2 at an event in Lagos, Nigeria.
CEO Obafemi Banigbe said it was not just a logo change but a total evolution. The company framed the change as part of a four-phase recovery plan: stabilisation, modernisation, transformation and growth.
In July 2025, the NCC approved a national roaming deal with MTN. It took effect in October 2025 and will run for three years. Since July 2025, T2’s subscriptions have grown from 2.73 million to 3.61 million.
That suggests the stabilisation and growth parts of the plan are already under way, even though the gains have flattened since April.
T2 grew in the first year after its rebrand, but the gains have levelled off since April 2026. Reporting so far points to customer losses, old infrastructure and a small footprint.
NCC porting data reports that 2,725 subscribers left T2 in the three months after the rebrand. Only 61 came in. Between January and October 2025, 28,173 ports went out and 87 came in.
In September 2025, T2 signed a systems modernisation partnership with Knot Solutions and the MTN roaming agreement. Its $3 billion, four-year investment plan covers a network refresh, but no spending figures have been disclosed.
In the NCC’s fourth-quarter 2025 report, T2 recorded the fastest average rural download speed at 24.9 Mbps, against 15.8 for MTN, 10.6 for Airtel and 9.5 for Globacom. It also led on technical compliance on major roads, which the report attributes partly to the MTN roaming deal.
Last updated: November 11, 2026
