Reliance Info presages 7 lakh subscribers by June

Reliance Infocomm, which launched its pre-paid mobile services in Gujarat yesterday, hopes to increase its customer base in the state to seven lakh in the next four months.

Reliance Infocomm launched its post-paid services in May under the Reliance India Mobile (RIM) brand. At present the company has a subscriber base of around 4.50 lakh.

"We expect our customer base to touch seven lakh in Gujarat by the end of four months. Since our post-paid as well as pre-paid tariffs are competitive, we expect the pre-paid to post-paid ratio to stabilise at around 60:40 in the state," said Sanjeev Ghanate, head, marketing, Reliance Infocomm.

The overall countrywide ratio for pre-paid users to post-paid users is at around 80:20.

The RIM prepaid card was formally launched in the state by Parimal Nathwani, chairman, Reliance Development Trust, and Hemant Desai, circle sponsor, Reliance Infocomm, Gujarat, in Ahmedabad on Monday.

The RIM prepaid will be available with six different handsets and six schemes. The entry level scheme will offer a Motorola C131 handset for Rs 3,500 with a free RIM prepaid connection.

The scheme will offer rechargeable vouchers worth Rs 3,240, which will be valid for six months. It will also have grace period of six months.

Users can recharge their pre-paid connection with vouchers of denominations Rs 324, Rs 500 or Rs 1080, which will have a validity period of 30 days, 60 days and 90 days, respectively.

SMS will be charged at Re 1 for intra-circle, Rs 2 for national and Rs 3 for international messages. "We will announce a plan for our post-paid customers to shift to the pre-paid segment," said Hemant Desai. The prepaid service will have no roaming airtime rentals and the recharge vouchers can be purchased from any part of the country.

"With the RIM pre-paid service, we expect our national customer base across seven circles to touch one crore by the end of four months," Desai said.

According to Desai, while the cellular industry in the country has been growing at 100 per cent every year for the past four years, with the entry of RIM, the growth in the past one year has been 160 per cent.

"Over 60 per cent of all RIM customers use the R World facilities and there are 2.1 billion hits at R-World every month. More than two lakh customers have registered with R-Connect, making Reliance Infocomm the third largest Internet service provider in the country," he added.