Though mobile service providers have been continuously launching promotion campaigns and offering call charges discounts, they are still earning large profits from the services.

Ten years ago, Vietnam only had 300,000 mobile phone subscribers. ,Now it has 130 million subscribers distributed between seven mobile phone networks. After the heyday of the increase in mobile subscribers, service providers turned to smaller segments of the market because more and more service providers jumped into the market. As the result, they must compete with each other by lowering service fees in order to retain old clients and attract new clients.

In principle, when service providers compete with each other and lower service fees, customers are the ones who benefit. However, the fact of the matter is people still have to pay high prices for telecom services.

Continuously earning fat profit

For the last three consecutive years, two big guys in the telecom market, MobiFone and Viettel, listed themselves among the 1000 and 10 biggest corporate income tax payers. MobiFone tops the list of biggest tax payers with a sum of paid taxes of six trillion dong. This shows that the big guys in the telecom industry are earning fat profits.

Even EVN Telecom, which is considered the “youngest brother” in the market, also earns a monthly turnover of over 200 billion dong and its number of subscribers has exceeded 4.65 million. Other service providers do not regularly publicly announce their turnover. However, if one considers that the service providers regularly urge the Ministry of Information and Communication to grant new prefixes to numbers on their mobile network, one would understand that telecom service providers have been growing well.

Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper has quoted its sources as saying that if the state management agencies officially decrease call charges, then mobile calling charges will also decrease further despite the fact that service providers all say that the charges cannot be slashed further.

If the state management agencies ease calling charges, subscribers of all networks will benefit. If the agencies still let service providers spontaneously compete with each other only some groups of subscribers will benefit.

Promotion campaigns, discounts still on the rise

The telecom service market has been always hot with the calling charges reduction war triggered by telecom service providers. The brothers of VinaPhone and MobiFone (both belong to the Vietnam Post and Telecommunication Group VNPT) have been offering charge discounts in shifts. For example, clients once had to pay 6000 dong only when they made an 100-minute inner-network call, or they could made 10-minute call and pay for one minute only.

Hai, a pre-paid MobiFone subscriber, who lives in Go Vap District in HCM City, admitted that it is sometimes inconvenient to purchase cards for the phones, but he still prefers pre-paid service packages because service provider always offers discounts for pre-paid subscribers.

In general, the service provider offers discounts one or two times a month. Meanwhile, if Hai buys phone cards from sale agents, he still can enjoy a four percent discount.

One question has been raised as to why service providers continue to offer discounts in different promotional campaigns but they do not ease call charges?

Source: Cong An Nhan Dan