Despite the high-decibel launch of services in the Indian market in December 2009, Uninor, a joint venture between New Delhi-based Unitech and Norway?s Telenor, seems to be floundering. Its decision to delete data and remove subscribers who are inactive for two months or more seems to be the cause.
The company, which started its operations with a loud campaign, supported by a ?dynamic pricing? that offered attractive rates as the subscriber moves around locally, has seen its new subscriber additions dip in consecutive months since January. Subscriber figures turned negative in May, with Uninor losing 8,722 subscribers from its network.
Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications and Vodafone Essar added 3 million, 2.8 million and 2.5 million subscribers, respectively.
Uninor added 1.3 million subscribers in January, a month after the launch. In February it added 1 million subscribers, 7 lakh in March and 7.5 lakh in April. In June, according to Trai data, the company had a total subscriber base of around 5 million.
Uninor, however, says the purging of data essentially adds to accuracy, that further helps the company maintain clarity of records.
According to Rajiv Bawa, EVP, Corporate Affairs of the company, ?Uninor believes that this method will add further accuracy to subscriber data that will, in turn, improve accuracy of our business information systems and reliability of data for all stakeholders.?
Rahul Gupta of Strategy Analytics, a research firm, sees Uninor expanding its network slow, but steady in the Indian market. ?Uninor is a very promising player compared with other new entrants in the telecom industry. Its network is slowly expanding and the company has a long-term vision for India,? he says.
However, although a corrective action, the pruning of data can be a matter of concern for Uninor in the long run, Gupta added.
Analysts reckon that there would have been indeed a purging of data for Uninor, since the company relied heavily on distributors for getting subscribers, which would have led to false records.
An analyst with a multinational bank, who did not want to be quoted, said that Uninor entered the Indian market not on a tariff strategy but on distributor strategy.
?It offered more commission to distributors on each Uninor SIM. Tempted by the increased margins, the distributors showed false records of sales.?
However, the company was quick to make amends by changing its inactive subscriber period from 90 days to 60.
Yet another reason for lower number of subscriber additions is that Uninor has followed ‘dynamic pricing’ despite entering the Indian telecom market at the time when Tata Docomo had launched per second plan, which prompted other incumbents to follow suit.
Says a company spokesperson: ?Being the 14 th operator in the market, we did not follow the one-paisa per second norm. Instead, we chose to go with the talk longer and call more plans.?
However, its ?24/7 badalta plan? was difficult for subscribers to understand, and and hence didn’t get traction, much evident from its net adds, say analysts.