VietNamNet Bridge – Mobile service providers have launched a lot of promotion campaigns, hoping to increase the numbers of subscribers and to satisfy the demand which is believed to increase sharply on Tet.

The Military Telecom Company Viettel has decided to extend the latest promotion programme until the end of January 31, 2011.

Under the programme, subscribers only have to pay the monthly subscription fee and 25,000 dong a month in order to be able to enjoy charge exemption for all the inner-network calls with the duration of less than 10 minutes.

A source from Viettel said that since the day when the company applied the policies that allow subscribers to enjoy charge exemption for the inner-network calls, the company has seen clear changes in the consumption tendency. Especially, the number of post-paid subscribers has increased by 10 percent.

Besides the above said policy, Viettel has also provided a new service package, allowing people, who make calls from fixed lines to mobile subscribers, to enjoy the charges lower by 40 percent than the normal charges.

VinaPhone, one of the three biggest mobile service providers, has also launched a new promotion programme applied to new post-paid subscribers. The provider hopes that the programme will help attract about 100,000 new subscribers in the Tet months.

Prior to that, the programme on allowing to exempt charges for the minutes from the second to 10^th of inner-network calls was also very successfully carried out by MobiFone in all provinces and cities nationwide. MobiFone also three times extended the promotion programme, under which subscribers, who make 10-minute calls, only have to pay for one minute. The policy only ended on December 31, 2010.

Sources said that the mobile service provider is considering launching new promotion programmes into the market in some days.

Vietnamobile, a new comer on the market, has launched a promotion programme applied to subscribers in the south. Under the programme, with just 1000 dong, subscribers can make a 60-minute inner-network call. Vietnamobile hopes that with the policy, it may become the mobile network which has the highest number of mobile phone subscribers among the four small networks.

There are seven mobile phone networks in Vietnam’s telecom market, including three biggest operators, VinaPhone, MobiFone and Viettel, called “the big guys”, which are holding the biggest market share. Vietnamobile is among the other four smaller networks.

Though being considered a “small network”, Vietnamobile has still decided to spend much money to stimulate the demand. The mobile service provider has decided to spent five billion dong to run a promotion programme. It has decided to award a golden simcard weighing 277 taels of gold (worth one billion dong) to the subscriber who wins the special prize of the programme.

Elizabete Fong, Managing Director of Vietnamobile, said that the promotion programme aims to attract more people to use Vietnamobile’s services and persuade subscribers keep simcards for a longer time.

However, commenting about the moves by mobile service providers, experts say the promotion programmes would not help increase the number of new subscribers rapidly. Statistics showed that the number of new subscribers was 4-7 times lower than that of the previous year. Viettel, for example, only got 2.1 million new subscribers in 2010, while the figure was 16 million in 2009.

According to the Ministry of Information and Communication, the number of mobile phone subscribers in 2010 reached 148 million, or 35 million higher than in 2009.

C. V