Mobile phone users’ base contracts

Daily Times - KARACHI: Cellular phone subscribers’ base has witnessed a significant contraction by 2.22 percent in January as the result of ongoing correction process in the sector. The Pakistan Telecomm-unication Authority’s (PTA) latest statistics has shown decline of 2.17 million users in the overall sector,

which has reduced the teledensity of the country by 1.4 percent to 58.20 percent by the end of January. The number of total subscribers now stands at 95.4 million in the country after reducing from 97.57 million in a month. For the first time, the number of cellular phone connections has witnessed a negative growth in the current fiscal year 2009-10. Since the beginning of the current fiscal year 2009-10, the cellular phone sector has been going on the modest growth track as the competition has saturated the market of telephony service. The cellular phone growth witnessed more than one percent growth only in July 2009 by 1.28 percent. Telecom experts forecast this negative growth to continue in the coming months owing to the correction process of the sector launched in October 2009 by PTA. Since the launch of new SIM Information System-668, a large number of SIMs were found unregistered on Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC) and cellular phone operators had to be involved in this campaign to block unwanted or extra SIMs and reissue them to the existing users by rectifying subscribers’ data. Officials of the cellular phone companies said that operators were endeavoring to retain their subscribers by rectifying data of non-users and users in order to avoid losing customers, however, a substantial number of customers did prefer to buy new SIMs or use other SIMs rather than standing in the long queues for rectification of data. muhammad yasir