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Ministry to tighten norms for mobile service promotion deals
The Ministry of Information and Communications is set to make promotion norms more stringent for mobile phone companies to head off unhealthy competition, an official said to Dau tu (Investment) newspaper.
Pham Hong Hai, head of the ministry's Department of Telecommunications, said his ministry and the Ministry of Industry and Trade would issue a joint circular spelling out on what services and products they can offer promotions.
It would be issued by the end of this quarter or early in the second quarter, he said.
Promotions are an important marketing tool for the mobile phone companies but they also increase the number of inactive accounts, according to industry experts.
Many people refer to buy a new simcard offered at cheap rates rather than top up their old account, and discard the latter, resulting in a waste of digital resources, they said.
If the mobile operators continue to undercut each other with their chaotic promotions, they would only create difficulties for themselves since tariffs have fallen almost to the level of their costs, they said.
Viet Nam, which has a population of 87 million, had more than 130 million mobile subscriptions at the end of last year, according to the Ministry of Information and Communications.
But half of them are inactive subscriptions, mostly made during promotion campaigns involving new simcards, they explained.
There are seven mobile phone service providers, with Viettel, MobiFone, and Vinaphone accounting for the largest market shares.
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