How Mike Adenuga’s Globacom fell to a $1.3 billion value

Mike Adenuga built his fortune out of businesses that Nigerians use every day: calls, data, fuel. For years, Globacom was the most visible emblem of that wealth, the green network that bullied bigger rivals into per-second billing and cheaper tariffs.

Run the numbers today, and the story looks very different.

Because Glo is privately held and publishes no detailed accounts, the only way to value it is by comparison. The natural yardsticks are MTN Nigeria Communications Plc, traded in Lagos, and Airtel Africa Plc, listed in London and Lagos. Both face the same currency shocks, the same regulator, the same Nigerian consumers Adenuga has spent two decades courting.

On subscribers, the Nigerian Communications Commission has already done the hard work. After a stricter clean-up of “active” SIM definitions, TechCabal reported last year in a blockbuster piece that Globacom now has about 19.1 million active lines and roughly 13% market share, a long way from its swaggering years. By contrast, MTN sits near the top of the pack with around 78 million users, according to NCC figures cited in local press.

On the equity side, MTN Nigeria currently carries a market value of about ₦9.9 trillion, making it one of the two most valuable companies on the Nigerian Exchange. Airtel Africa, buoyed by a rally in London and enthusiasm over its mobile-money unit, is worth about $14.6 billion. The group serves 173.8 million customers across 14 African markets.

Those two datapoints give investors a rough price per user. Divide MTN’s ₦9.9 trillion by its ~78 million subscribers and the market is paying on the order of ₦125,000 per active SIM. Airtel’s $14.6 billion, converted at an average official rate around ₦1,445 to the dollar for November 2025, works out to roughly ₦21 trillion in naira terms, or about ₦120,000 per customer.

Average those and you get a sector benchmark of about ₦123,000 per subscriber for big African telcos that the market actually likes.

Now drop Globacom into that template. Take roughly 19–20 million active lines, multiply by ₦123,000, and you land near ₦2.3–₂.5 trillion of equity value – in dollar terms, about $1.6 billion, give or take, at today’s official FX. That’s the clean, mechanical answer Adenuga might have enjoyed if Glo’s fundamentals looked like MTN’s or Airtel’s.

They don’t, and that’s where the valuation really slides.

TechCabal’s investigation into “the stunning decline of Globacom” laid out just how dramatic the fall has been. In March 2024, Glo reported 62.1 million subscribers. After the NCC insisted everyone strip out dormant and non-revenue-generating SIMs, that number collapsed to 19.1 million by September – a loss of roughly 43 million lines, the steepest drop of any operator. If you run today’s sector multiples on that inflated March figure, Globacom would have screened as a ₦7–₦8 trillion company, in the $5 billion neighborhood.

Instead, the cleanup revealed a smaller, weaker network sitting behind the old marketing.

Under the hood, the problems look less like bad luck and more like strategic drift. TechCabal describes a company that still owns thousands of its own towers and carries the full burden of diesel, security, and maintenance at a time when most peers lean on specialist towercos. It also points to a “one-man” decision culture around Adenuga, slow capex, and chronic under-exploitation of prized assets such as the Glo-1 submarine cable and a payment-service-bank licence that has yet to become a real fintech story.

Stack that against Airtel Africa, whose mobile-money arm is being talked up for a future listing, and MTN Nigeria, which is pouring capital into data and digital services, and it’s hard to argue Glo deserves the same per-subscriber multiple.

So the market-style answer is to haircut the benchmark. Trim that ₦123,000 per-user figure by 20–30% for weaker ARPU, slower data and fintech monetisation, and higher execution risk. Globacom’s implied valuation drops into the ₦1.7–₦1.9 trillion band — roughly $1.2–$1.3 billion in today’s naira.

For Adenuga, who once watched Glo nip at MTN’s heels and saw his own net worth swing with those ambitions, the message from the math is blunt. The flagship telecom he built is still valuable, still hard to replicate, but it’s no longer priced like a national champion. It’s priced like a fixer-upper in a market where rivals have already moved on to the next game.