Dtac Cuts Rate To Match Ais's

[george]

DTAC cuts rate to match AIS's

BANGKOK: -- A significant drop in the number of new subscribers has forced second-ranked mobile operator DTAC to reverse its strategy and cut tariffs to a record low, further intensifying the ongoing price war.

Mobile calling rates are currently at an all-time low at three baht per call, equivalent to the local fixed-line rate.

DTAC yesterday offered prepaid customers such a rate from 12 am to 4 pm. Calls made in off-hours will be charged at five baht for the first minute and 25 satang a minute afterward.

The campaign targeted its bigger rival Advanced Info Service (AIS), after acknowledging the market leader enjoyed a sharp increase in sales growth and lower number of defecting customers.

Earlier, DTAC had said that it could not reduce its prices any further due to the higher concession cost it was shouldering. But the Norwegian-owned operator seemed to have changed its mind.

''We can't stand still now. We need to fight back with AIS as we could not let the market leader take away our title as the 'best-value-for-money' brand,'' said CEO Sigve Brekke.

He admitted that DTAC had been hurt by AIS's current record-low promotional packages, seeing at least a 20% drop in new-subscriber growth in April.

''Even though the figure is still not a big impact to us, we need to react now in a bid to maintain our brand position.''

AIS was counting on gaining thousands of new customers after it launched promotions two months ago. The company reported more than 100,000 net new subscribers in March from 33,600 in February and 104,000 in January.

The sales figure is expected to improve further in April.

DTAC is expected to see more than 600,000 net new subscribers in the first three months, a windfall from the threatened boycott of products and services linked with AIS's parent Shin Corp.

Third-ranked True Move reported 441,379 new subscribers in the first quarter.

Thailand recorded three million more mobile-phone subscribers in 2005, bringing the total to 28 million. The total is now around 30 million.

--Bangkok Post 2006-05-03

[gharknes]

Well it seems there is more going on than price cutting, I have been unable to call a Dtac mobile from AIS for over 3 weeks now, I have two thoughts here, AIS are trying to get existing Dtac users to move to AIS or more likely Dtac are blocking AIS call trying to entice AIS users to move to them as there are no issues with calls on Dtac, either way someone needs to do something, it is extremely inconvenient

[bquick]

ais phone calls are very bad quality. they put too many calls on the same bandwidth to save them money but at the customers loss. have to ring and ring in some places wit the ais phone to connect. real annoying.

So i take it that rumour of taksin buying dtac tru a malayasian sompany a few months back was false?