The market, the operators, and where it is going.
Everything on this page resolves to a primary source: the regulator's monthly statistics for the market, the two operators' own filings for the money. Readings as at May 2026.
Market
CAM · 2012-01 – 2026-05Total, prepaid and postpaid, monthly
Communications Authority of Maldives. The 2018–21 decline is prepaid; postpaid rose throughout it.
Mobile subscriptions per 100 residents
Resident population interpolated geometrically between MBS medium-variant anchors (2022: 547,651; 2032: 641,709), carried from the Nyra People programme. A model, not an official monthly series. Penetration above 100% reflects multi-SIM holding, migrant workers and visitor SIMs, not more phones than people.
Fixed broadband and mobile broadband subscriptions
CAM's mobile-broadband headline includes LTE fixed-wireless, a household router product. The dashed line removes it.
Fixed telephone lines, Malé region and other regions
CAM. The only geographic split the regulator publishes — and the only one this programme can therefore analyse.
Mean month-on-month change in prepaid subscriptions by calendar month, 2022 onward. Positive in the December–March tourist high season and negative in June–July, which is consistent with short-stay visitor SIMs entering and leaving the base — but the market series cannot separate visitor SIMs from resident ones, so this is an association, not a measurement of tourist SIM volume.
| Month | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean change in prepaid base | +1.17% | +0.55% | +0.24% | −0.16% | −0.22% | −0.37% | −0.36% | +0.32% | +0.28% | +0.17% | +0.54% | +1.65% |
Operators
CMDA filings · 2022-Q4 – 2026-Q2Annual figures summed from the quarterly income statements, so revenue, EBITDA and margin are computed identically for both. EBITDA here is the operating result plus depreciation and amortisation — see the definition warning below.
| MVR millions | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ooredoo | Dhiraagu | Ooredoo | Dhiraagu | Ooredoo | Dhiraagu | |
| Revenue | 2097 | 2632 | 2203 | 2787 | 2216 | 2838 |
| — mobile | 1616 | 1377 | 1681 | 1475 | 1645 | 1515 |
| — fixed, broadband & enterprise | 480 | 1178 | 521 | 1226 | 568 | 1220 |
| EBITDA (derived) | 1091 | 1533 | 1112 | 1608 | 1167 | 1648 |
| EBITDA margin | 52.0% | 58.2% | 50.5% | 57.7% | 52.6% | 58.1% |
| Profit after tax | 685 | 896 | 684 | 946 | 723 | 955 |
Ooredoo's reported EBITDA cannot be reproduced from its own published income statement by adding depreciation back to the operating result (MVR 1,167m derived against MVR 1,263m reported for 2025); Dhiraagu's can, to within 0.6%. Reported margins are therefore not like-for-like, and this site shows a consistently derived EBITDA next to each operator's reported figure rather than ranking the two on their own definitions.
Total revenue, MVR '000
Quarterly income statements filed to the CMDA. Dhiraagu is the larger business by revenue in every quarter of the period.
Mobile service revenue as a share of total revenue, %
The two businesses are not the same shape: Ooredoo earns around seven in ten rufiyaa from mobile, Dhiraagu closer to five, and both are drifting toward fixed and enterprise.
Reported figures, taken verbatim from the annual reports. Shown separately from the derived table above rather than mixed into it.
| MVR millions | Year | Revenue | EBITDA | Profit after tax | Capital investment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ooredoo Maldives | 2022 | 1,924 | 1,032 | 560 | — |
| Ooredoo Maldives | 2023 | 2,097 | 1,178 | 685 | — |
| Ooredoo Maldives | 2024 | 2,203 | 1,202 | 684 | — |
| Ooredoo Maldives | 2025 | 2,216 | 1,263 | 723 | 257 |
| Dhiraagu | 2021 | 2,527 | 1,372 | 813 | 311 |
| Dhiraagu | 2022 | 2,586 | 1,428 | 909 | 476 |
| Dhiraagu | 2023 | 2,632 | 1,529 | 896 | 627 |
| Dhiraagu | 2024 | 2,787 | 1,607 | 946 | 574 |
| Dhiraagu | 2025 | 2,838 | 1,638 | 949 | 558 |
Sources: Ooredoo Maldives Annual Report 2023 and 2025; Dhiraagu Annual Report 2023 and 2025, all filed to the CMDA InformInvestor portal.
Economics
revenue decompositionMarket-level mobile ARPU: both operators' mobile service revenue divided by the average CAM mobile subscription count. The denominator counts SIMs, not people, so this is revenue per active SIM — a lower number than revenue per customer, and not comparable to an operator's own reported ARPU.
| Year | Mobile service revenue, MVR m | Average subscriptions | Revenue per subscription, monthly | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 2992 | 727,452 | MVR 342.78 | — |
| 2024 | 3156 | 768,422 | MVR 342.26 | −0.2% |
| 2025 | 3160 | 808,699 | MVR 325.61 | −4.9% |
Decomposition: 2025 mobile revenue was 0.1% above 2024 while the average subscription base was 5.2% higher. Holding revenue constant, that arithmetic forces revenue per subscription down 4.9%. This is an accounting identity, not a causal claim — it says where the growth did and did not come from, not why.
Forecast
forecast → backtest → compare → selectFitted from 2022-01, projected 60 months. Model chosen by rolling-origin backtest over 6 origins at a 12-month horizon.
| Candidate model | MASE | MAPE | MAE | RMSE | Origins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Naive with driftpublished | 0.188 | 0.81% | 6,609 | 8,106 | 6 |
| Holt-Winters (additive) | 0.192 | 0.83% | 6,747 | 7,999 | 6 |
| SARIMA(1,1,1)(0,1,1)₁₂ | 0.758 | 3.29% | 26,644 | 54,757 | 6 |
| Holt's linear trend | 0.933 | 4.00% | 32,807 | 39,340 | 6 |
| Seasonal naive | 1.126 | 4.85% | 39,572 | 39,920 | 6 |
lowest backtest MASE (0.188) over 6 rolling origins. MASE is scaled against the in-sample seasonal-naive error, so below 1.0 means the model beats repeating last year's month. The result is uncomfortable for anyone who likes complicated models: on a post-2022 window a straight line through the recent trend beats SARIMA and Holt-Winters on every series here. Subscription counts move slowly and administratively; there is very little seasonal structure left for a seasonal model to find, and the extra parameters buy nothing.