Bitcoin dropped below $60,000 on Friday, its lowest level since October 2024, just before Donald Trump’s election which propelled it to a record high.

The currency fell by about 6 percent around 1615 GMT, to $59.7709, before paring its losses slightly.

The election of Trump, a staunch advocate of cryptocurrencies, to the White House in November 2024 for a second term sparked a wave of enthusiasm in the sector, sending the price of bitcoin soaring to nearly $110,000.

AFP

The EU slapped a 200-million-euro ($232 million) fine on Chinese-owned online retailer Temu on Thursday for allowing the sale of illegal products, including dangerous baby toys and defective chargers.

“The company failed to diligently identify, analyse, and assess the systemic risks of illegal products being offered on its platform and the resulting harm to consumers in the European Union,” the EU said.

According to EU regulators, European consumers are “very likely to encounter illegal items” on Temu, and the company “seriously underestimated how often EU consumers are likely to” see such products.

Temu is extremely popular in the European Union, with 130 million users after entering the bloc’s market in 2023.

But it has come under fierce scrutiny since October 2024 when the EU opened its investigation, which preliminarily found in July last year that Temu had breached landmark rules over the risks of illegal products.

“Temu is a very big player in the European market,” EU tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen told reporters, adding that its size meant that a “very big part” of EU consumers get their hands on such illegal products.

Thursday’s fine is only the second imposed under the EU’s powerful Digital Services Act (DSA) on content, after Elon Musk’s X platform received a 120-million-euro fine in December.

Under the DSA, the world’s most popular digital platforms including social media apps and online retailers must conduct a risk assessment to understand what dangers they pose and how to tackle the risks.

The EU slammed Temu for its 2024 risk assessment that it said “falls short of the standards”, citing the discovery of baby toys, such as rattles, containing chemicals that exceeded legal safety limits, and chargers that failed basic safety tests. It also pointed to jewellery.

The European Commission said Temu failed to properly assess the platform’s design and how it “could amplify dissemination risks of illegal products”.

– EU focus on China –

The DSA is part of the EU’s bolstered legal armoury to curb what the bloc considers excesses by Big Tech, and fines can go as high as six percent of a company’s total worldwide annual turnover.

While the EU could have hit Temu with a higher fine, a European Commission official said the amount was proportionate to the breach since it concerned a risk assessment for one year where the conclusions were “clear-cut”.

Temu must now pay the fine and present a plan to the EU by August 28 that includes what action it will take to address the breaches.

If Temu does not comply, it faces periodic penalty payments.

It can also appeal the fine, as Musk has already done in the EU courts.

The EU continues to investigate other suspected breaches in the same probe including the use of addictive design features that could hurt users’ physical and mental well-being, and how Temu’s systems recommend content and products.

The fine comes a day before the EU executive is set to debate how the 27-nation bloc should approach China to level the playing field, with top EU officials warning that Europe must get tougher on China to defend its economy.

Brussels has already stepped up its anti-subsidy investigations into Chinese companies investing in Europe, and on Thursday it opened an in-depth probe into Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com’s bid for Ceconomy, a major German electronics retail group, on suspicion it was boosted by state subsidies.

Customers of the big four telecom operators in the country spent about N9 trillion on airtime for their voice calls and data in 2025, pushing up telecom operators’ revenue in the last financial year.

MTN Nigeria got about N5.3 trillion in total revenue from their N90.3 million customers’ airtime purchase for the year ended December 31, 2025. This pushed them back to record a profit after tax of N1.11 trillion.

Airtel Nigeria earned about N3.1trn in revenue from airtime sales from their 60.9m customers with data revenue marking rapid growth as smartphone adoption and internet penetration continue to rise across its network.

Though Globacom and T2/9mobile have not been publishing their detailed public financials, report puts industry analysts and analysis done at estimated combined revenue from airtime to be close to N2trn for 2025. Globacom has about 22.3m customers and T2 mobile has 3.3m customers.

The increase in airtime earnings was due to sharp rise in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) recorded by the operators, according to some of their financial results and data by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

ARPU, a key telecom industry metric, measures the average amount each subscriber spends monthly on telecom services such as voice, data and digital products.

The full-year financial results released by MTN Nigeria showed that monthly ARPU rose to $3.60 in 2025 from $2.17 in 2024. If this is converted into the local currency, Naira, the company’s ARPU increased to N5,184.01 from N3,542.00.

This means that each customer on the network was spending an average of N5,184.01 per month in 2025.

This pushed the company’s revenue for the year to N5.2 trillion, a 55.1% increase when compared with the N3.3 trillion it recorded in 2024.

MTN disclosed that the number of active data subscribers grew by 11.6%, while smartphone penetration increased by 7.9 percentage points to 66.1%.

The company also recorded a 34% increase in data traffic, while average usage per subscriber rose by 20% to 13.1GB monthly, all of which boosted its ARPU.

In addition, MTN expanded its 4G population coverage by 2.1 percentage points to 84.6%, driven by accelerated investments in network infrastructure and service quality improvements.

As for Airtel Nigeria, monthly ARPU climbed to $2.4 in 2025 (full financial year ended March 31, 2026) from $1.7 in 2024.

In naira terms, the figure increased to N3,326.4 from N2,599.3. Despite the increase, an average customer on Airtel spends less monthly compared with MTN.

Airtel reported that its revenue grew by 47.4% in constant currency, largely driven by continued strength in the demand for data services and supported by tariff adjustments.

“In reported currency, revenue grew by 52.8% to $1,598m with Q4’26 revenue growth at 54.7% (40.2% in constant currency).

“The constant currency revenue growth was driven by ARPU growth of 36.7% and customer base growth of 9.4%,” the company stated.

The company’s data revenue increased by 63.6%, supported by growth in both data customers and data ARPU.

Airtel said data customer growth stood at 8.1%, while data ARPU expanded by 49.2% during the year.

Airtel Nigeria also recorded a significant rise in internet consumption, with average data usage per customer increasing by 30.8% to 11GB monthly from 8.4GB recorded in the previous year.

The increase in customer spending followed the implementation of the 50% telecom tariff adjustment approved by the NCC early last year, which raised the prices of voice calls, SMS and data bundles across the industry.

With the increment, the cost of an SMS, which stood at N4.00 for several years, was increased to N6.00, while voice call and data tariffs were also increased accordingly.

But the growing data consumption among Nigerians was identified as a major factor in lifting telecom revenues and subscriber spending.

According to the NCC, data consumption in Nigeria has been growing at an unprecedented level between last year and this year.

The Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr. Aminu Maida, disclosed recently that Nigerians are now consuming about 45,800 terabytes of data every day, reflecting the country’s rapidly growing dependence on internet services and digital platforms.

Maida said the daily consumption brought total consumed data in March 2026 to 1.42 million, compared with 995,000 terabytes recorded within the corresponding period of 2025.

However, the NCC boss said the increase in data usage by Nigerians is also putting a strain on the telecom networks, a development that has led to the poor service quality experienced by subscribers in some places recently.

But the NCC said the operators are responding to this challenge by increasing their investments in network capacity expansion. He also said the federal government is actively making efforts to stabilise the network quality.