GP’s scrap with BTRC ate up market share
Within an unusual development, Grameenphone's active customer number came right down to 7.53 crore by the end of March after falling for just two consecutive months, as the operator could not get approval to sell fresh connections for years.
Grameenphone began the entire year with 7.65 crore active customers, however in February and March, the very best operator lost 1.58 % market share, or even more than 11 lakh active users, regarding to a fresh report of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).
The increased loss of customers is a rare incident for the country's top carrier and the BTRC officials who manage operators could not remember the previous time when the number of Grameenphone users dropped for two weeks in a row.
The operator also experienced a decline in active online connections.
At the turn of the year, Grameenphone had accounted for 46.18 % internet users in Bangladesh. But at the end of the primary quarter, its show declined to 45.42 %.
Some 4.04 crore Grameenphone subscribers are now using the internet.
Grameenphone faced a good scarcity of numbers right from the start of the quarter that negatively impacted the subscriber base, said Yasir Azman, ceo of the operator, even while releasing the January-March quarter financial survey, recently.
"We continued to handle challenges in the primary quarter of 2020. The restrictions positioned on us by our regulator by not really issuing NOCs [no-objection certificates] lasted until March, which impacted our planned expense in the united states," he added.
Due to this fact, the operator cannot offer for sale new connections. It confronted the restriction from the middle of this past year until March this season involving BTRC's audit statements of Tk 12,580 crore.
After continuous engagement, Grameenphone received approval from the commission on March 12 to recycle numbers designed for reselling to meet customers' demand, said Md Hasan, a spokesperson of the operator.
As the most notable carrier lost some marketplace share while some gained, Grameenphone has produce fresh offers and declared free call mins -- a move that has created caused a ripple in the industry.
However, on the back of overall buyers, Grameenphone could manage to increase its 4G users and finished the quarter with 1.42 crore members, up from 1.19 crore by the end of 2019.
The operator has been concentrating on enhancing 4G users going back few quarters. Therefore, data consumption by the users rose, explained a senior executive of Grameenphone.
Robi, the second-most significant operator, ended the initially quarter with 4.97 crore dynamic users after it gained some marketplace to have it to 30.01 %. Banglalink has 21.43 per cent market share and state-owned Teletalk has 2.90 % stake, based on the report.
At the end of March, the full total active cellular connections stood at 16.53 crore by March, in line with the BTRC report.
