India’s third largest telecom operator Reliance Communications (RCom) has hiked mobiles tariff rates by 20% across the country and in-addition reduced available talk-time offers on Promotional schemes and special plans by around 60%.
RCom has basically hiked 20% call rates on its popular Commitment Plan which been used the majority of the subscriber base. The tariff rates for Commitment Plan 21 and Commitment Plan 45 has been hiked from 1p/sec to 1.2p/sec on local calls. For Commitment Plan 48 and Commitment Plan 46 RCom has slashed the free voice minutes by around 60%. This new tariff rates apply for all existing and new customers across the country with immediate effect.
Gurdeep Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Wireless, Reliance Communications was quoted in a financial daily saying “Our Headline Tariff increase from 1.2 to 1.5 paisa per second in October last year did not see any traffic elasticity and there has been no fall in customer demand or change in usage patterns, as we successfully migrated our entire base to the Headline Tariff. With the Indian telecom industry now heading for a phase of consolidation, with smaller operators shutting down or scaling down their operations and easing off hyper-competitive pressures, this will help pricing power move back to serious, long-term and pan-India scale operators and positively impact profitability.
We have now corrected all Commitment Plans across the country and have increased tariffs by between 20 per cent and 30 per cent.”
We think this tariff hike from RCom will promote other Indian telecom operators to think about hiking their tariff rates. What do you think?