The country’s cell phone industry has witnessed a negative growth in the first half of this year, with only 27.69 lakh new subscribers having active SIMs.
Although half of the mobile phone operators had earlier used to register more than 75 lakh new subscribers in the first half of the previous years, a recent report of telecom regulatory body revealed the total number of new subscribers declined by over 68% in the first six months of 2014.
According to Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) statistics, the country’s cell phone industry added 6.14 crore new active SIMs in the last four years with an average industry growth of 76.69 lakh active SIMs every six months.
During that period, the industry did not witness any single half (six month unit) where SIMs growth was less than 33.92 lakh, says the BTRC report.
“May be, both the World Cup Football and the Ramadan month have pushed us in a challenging situation, but still we are very hopeful that the industry will be bounced back shortly,” Mohiuddin Babar, vice-president of Robi told the Dhaka Tribune.
In July-December 2012 period, the industry had witnessed 33.92 lakh active SIMs increasing as BTRC, for the first time, had introduced post activation but all on a sudden selling of new SIMs comes to a nearly halt.
Before second half of 2012, the industry had acquired 83.33 lakh active SIM users in first half. The industry added 90.21 lakh in 2011, 77.89 lakh in 2010.
The mobile industry was also able to increase its subscriber’s numbers to 78.71 lakh and 87.33 lakh in both half of 2013.
Robi, the only operator, which could not increase any active SIMs, loses more than 13 lakh active numbers in the first six months of current year. It started the year with 2.53 crore active subscribers but the numbers came down to 2.40 crore at the end of June, this year.
Second largest operator, in terms of revenue collection, Robi had lost 16.75 lakh active subscribers only in March, which also affected the whole industry as a whole, market sources informed.
But the leading operator Grameenphone was able to add 21.23 lakh more active SIMs on their network against such a backdrop.
Banglalink could manage to register 9.13 lakh active SIMs while state-owned Teletalk added 7.73 lakh, Airtel 2.71 lakh and the oldest operator Citycell also added 51,000 active SIMs from January to June, this year.
Source: Dhaka Tribune
