Angola’s second-largest mobile operator, Movicel, has lost 1.8 million subscribers over the past six years — an average of roughly 25,000 a month — leaving it with just 302,579 active customers at the end of 2025, according to calculations by Expansão based on data from the Angolan Communications Institute (INACOM).
The haemorrhage of customers has been relentless even as Angola’s overall mobile market approaches saturation, with growth slowing across all operators. Movicel, once regarded as the country’s best mobile network and the pioneer of cellular services in Angola when it launched in the late 1990s as a business unit of state fixed-line carrier Angola Telecom, has failed to arrest the decline.
The single worst year for customer losses was 2022, when nearly 510,000 subscribers abandoned the network in a twelve-month period — the steepest annual drop since the operator’s founding.
The arrival of Africell, a Lebanese-origin operator that entered Angola backed by American capital, accelerated a deterioration that was already well under way. By end-2025, Angola’s mobile market counted more than 28.4 million subscribers. Of every 100 SIM cards connected to the country’s mobile networks, 73 belonged to market leader Unitel, 26 to Africell, and just one to Movicel. In 2019, Movicel held a 14% market share with more than 2.1 million customers; today it commands barely 1%.
Industry sources and officials attribute the collapse primarily to chronic underinvestment. A source at the Ministry of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Social Communication (MINTTICS) told Expansão that the last meaningful network infrastructure spending dates back several years. “We invested some millions of dollars in the network in 2019, but it was not enough; more was needed to modernise and maintain the existing infrastructure,” the source said.
The same MINTTICS source underscored that no telecommunications company can survive without sustained capital expenditure, given how capital-intensive the sector is. The timing of Movicel’s strategic missteps compounded the damage: in 2020, shortly after the partial network upgrade, the operator attempted to raise tariffs at a moment when service quality was already deteriorating sharply — a move widely seen as having fuelled the mass exodus of subscribers that has continued ever since.
Source: Expansão / Original article: http://expansao.co.ao/empresas/detalhe/movicel-a-definhar-perdeu-cerca-de-25-mil-subscritoresmes-desde-2019-73550.html
