Telecoms told to abide by limits on promotions

Mobile phone operators cannot offer customers bonuses worth more than 50 percent of a prepaid card’s value, a senior official has said.

The statement comes as the government tightens control over sales promotions.
Do Thang Hai, head of Trade Promotion Agency at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said Vietnam’s Trade Law stipulates that a bonus offered by businesses cannot exceed 50 percent of the value of the product they are selling, which means local telecom companies have violated the law in the huge promotions they have offered so far.
The agency has warned telecom firms against violating the regulation and asked them to stop all illegitimate sales promotions in October, Hai said in an interview with local newswire VnExpress Friday.
The intense competition between seven telecom firms offering mobile phone services in the country has threatened to get out of hand with some companies even offering a complementary 200 percent of the value of a prepaid card to attract subscribers. Between 5,000-8,000 new mobile phone subscribers are signed up every day, according to the VnExpress newswire.
“It’s hard to know when the competition will end as a company always tries to do better than its rivals,” a manager at Vinaphone said, according to VnExpress.
“The number of mobile phone subscribers has grown really fast in Vietnam, but not in a stable manner,” the Vietnam Economic Times quoted Hai as saying Friday. “Many people just want to enjoy the huge promotions, and then they throw the SIM cards away.”
“In other countries telecom companies focus on postpaid subscribers because they are the real active phone users. But it’s not the case in Vietnam.”
The Ministry of Information and Communications said last Wednesday that mobile phone users account for 87.9 percent of Vietnam’s 110 million phone subcribers.
According to a regulation that took effect on August 10, each person is allowed to subscribe to three numbers per mobile network. This means a person in Vietnam can register a maximum of 21 numbers with the seven service providers.

Source: Thanh Nien