Technology
FX-Linked Costs to Pressure Earnings of MTN, Airtel, Others
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
The present foreign exchange (forex) crisis in Nigeria will pose a huge threat to the 2020 earnings of players in the nation’s telecommunications sector, the Head of Equity Research at FBNQuest, Mr Tunde Abidoye, has projected.
In a research note made available to Business Post, he said though now more than ever, the industry was set to take a leading role in the government’s effort to diversify the economy, the FX issue could truncate this.
It was stated that through consistent significant investments by the mobile networks, the sector’s contribution to GDP has risen steadily from about 7.7 per cent in 2012 to 10.9 per cent in Q1 2020, now larger than that of the oil sector (9.5 per cent Q1 2020 oil GDP).
With respect to broadband, studies conducted by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) indicate that a 10 per cent increase in broadband penetration is likely to translate to increases of 2.0 per cent and 1.8 per cent in GDP for low-income and middle-income countries.
The targets (of 90 per cent broadband coverage at speeds of 10Mbps-25Mbps) stated in the national broadband plan 2020 is ambitious and audacious.
“Notwithstanding, we believe they are achievable. The plan’s success will depend on the right mix of policy implementation, private sector-led infrastructure investment, and government incentives. Specifically, impediments to right-of-way access and cost must be removed,” the note said.
In contrast to other sectors that were hit hard by the economic outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sector was one of the few that recorded growth in Q1.
Its essential role in easing the lockdown through the provision of digital tools for home working and social distancing resulted in a surge in demand for telecom services during the quarter.
In Q1, MTN Nigeria (MTNN) and Airtel Nigeria (not covered) both delivered strong revenue growth of 17 per cent y/y and 27 per cent y/y respectively, mainly driven by stellar growth in data revenue – which were up by more than 50 per cent for both firms.
The solid performance was carried on into Q2 on the back of strong data demand during the lockdown, with solid revenue growth of 17 per cent y/y (data 40 per cent y/y), Airtel’s Q1 2021 (end-June 2020) results which were recently published, providing positive read-across for the broad sector.
“Due to FX liquidity pressures, we expect a rise in FX-linked costs to exert downward pressure on the earnings of telecom operators,” it noted.
Recently, MTNN disclosed that the NAFEX rate of N385/$1 will now be applied to dollar-linked tower costs (vs. CBN’s official rate of N360 previously). The rate was only recently reviewed to N360/$1 in April (from N307 previously).
“However, we believe that the revenue growth from the surge in data traffic will more than offset the rise in costs.
“Regardless, our estimates are conservative. For MTNN, we forecast 2020 revenue and PBT growth of 13 per cent y/y and 6 per cent y/y respectively,” FBNQuest said.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) takes the quality of service (QoS) very seriously. As such, on a monthly basis, it measures the operators on four key QoS performance indicators namely; (1) the call setup success rate (CSSR), (2) dropped call rate (DCR), (3) the standalone dedicated control channel congestion (SDCCH), (4) the traffic control channel congestion rate (TCCH). The most recent disclosure (October 2019) from the NCC shows that MTNN and Airtel were within the required threshold for all the KPIs, it added.
It was stated that an independent survey on the service quality of GSM operators conducted by REACH Technologies, an indigenous fintech firm, corroborates the results of NCC’s monthly QoS assessment.
The random survey draws a conclusion from a sample size of 133 respondents residing in Nigeria’s urban region. Out of a maximum score of five points, MTNN scored the highest number of points – 2.3 points – on a weighted average basis. Airtel was the next best in terms of QoS with a score of 1.
About 60 per cent of the 133 respondents that were randomly polled subscribe to the MTNN network. This result is important because it underscores MTNN’s larger wallet share of urban subscribers.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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