Following the Supreme Court’s order for re-imposition of taxes on telecom services, mobile phone companies have raised tariffs for their products. The main increase in price has been for fixed priced cards which come with a bundle of SMS/Voice/Data on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis.
Telenor, Zong, Jazz and Ufone were quick to react and increased prices for their weekly, fortnightly and monthly cards as per following:
Monthly Card Prices
Operator | Card Name | Old Price | New Price | Price Difference | % Change in Price |
Ufone | Super Card Plus | 599 | 599 | 0 | 0 |
Ufone | Super Card | 520 | 550 | 30 | 6% |
Ufone | Mini Super Card | 300 | 330 | 30 | 10% |
Telenor | Easy Card 450 | 300 | 450 | 150 | 50% |
Telenor | Easy Card 800 | 600 | 800 | 200 | 33% |
Zong | Super Card | 500 | 650 | 150 | 30% |
Jazz | Super Duper | 499 | 600 | 101 | 20% |
Please note that we have outlined monthly cards only. Then there are weekly and fortnightly cards as well, prices for which were also increased.
We expect that this recent wave of a tariff increase on Cards is likely to impact the ARPUs, as these cards are the best selling products for mobile phone companies.
Ufone, for instance, offers most popular Super Card products — and this is also probably why their increment in card prices remained the lowest.
Similarly, prices for some data bundles have also increased. Following are the details:
Revision in Data Bundles
Operator | Bundle | Old Price | New Price | %Change in Price |
Ufone | WIP | 150 | 175 | 17% |
Jazz | Weekly Mega | 160 | 246 | 54% |
Jazz | Weekly Mega plus | 200 | 312 | 56% |
Telenor | 4G Weekly Ultra | 160 | 217 | 36% |
Zong | Super Weekly | 120 | 176 | 46% |
Zong | Super Weekly Plus | 156 | 228 | 46% |
Besides the re-imposition of taxes, the wave of high inflation was seen on various heads of operations including electricity tariff and petroleum product prices. This factor enhanced the cost of doing business for the operators, and was probably responsible for the decision for increase in card prices was seen.
One could argue that telecom operators could have absorbed the inflationary impact to some extent mainly to retain the growth in the consumption of telephony and mobile broadband services on their networks.
The abrupt hike on the monthly charges by all four operators may slow down the consumption of mobile phone services as customers at large are already burdened with high inflation which is adversely impacting on their purchasing power.
The trend also shows that operators smartly took decisions to revise up the prices of their packages in a way that competition among them may remain at a controlled level.