Airtel fires fresh shot as telecom price war heats up

In the coming weeks, Nigeria’s highly competitive telecommunications market will witness sweeping squeeze in call-rate prices following Airtel Nigeria’s move to crash prices of mobile phone talk-time to as low as N9 per minute from the current industry rate averaging N35 to N42 per minute across networks. This move comes barely two weeks after new owners, Bharti, acquired a substantial percentage of Celtel’s shares and re-branded in line with its mother company. Rival firms were non-committal about what kind of response would be forthcoming but industry analysts say they see a huge specter of price war looming with Airtel’s unexpected move. Analysts view Airtel’s move as strategic for market share as it intends to invite new subscribers on to its network and wrestle existing ones from competing networks. This, of course, will boost revenue in the long run as Airtel will enjoy better economies of scale through reduced cost per unit of delivering services as volume increases. “This move is in line with Bharti Airtel’s promise to Nigerians to give them affordable telecommunications services. We are indeed fulfilling that promise and we expect more Nigerians to come aboard Airtel”, a senior Airtel executive told BusinessDay in an interview yesterday. Bharti Airtel, who took over mobile operations in 15 African countries in a deal that makes it the world’s fifth-biggest mobile company with 180 million customers in 18 countries, is known for its low-cost strategy which has made it India’s market leader. In India , the company’s call rate charges is as low as 1US cents as against the 20US cents charged in Nigeria currently. The new owners, analysts say, are aiming basically to squeeze the current leadership of the market and this could force a new price war that has the potential of revolutionising GSM usage in the country. In the past four months, innovative promotional schemes from telecom companies (telcos) have reduced prices of voice calls and internet download access by 50 percent. The internet download price slash has forced prices down to as low as N3,000 from N10,000 in less than three months with MTN leading the slash race. Industry experts believe the price will in no time drop to levels comparable to UK charges which is currently about N1,250 or 5 UK pounds sterling Industry analysts thus strongly believe that the move by Bharti will force other operators to further review their present voice call rate in order to stay competitive,

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All this one na initial gra gra.
Make e happen

Well let's see action first because in the case of BlackBerry service they just responded to MTN's 3k/month. They obviously know that if they allow the market leader to be low on price by that margin, it's akin to going out of business completely.

If they are trully spoiled for war, they should have dropped BIS to 2k or even 2.5k at least.

Let them keep it coming, Etisalat and Glo should crash too, let the consumers get value for once!

Glo BB services is now N2800 down from N4800. It was a pleasant surprise when i went to renew today and do some other transactions, i wanted to pay N4800 when i was informed of the price change starting from today.