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Reliance Communications today said that they have increased their headline tariffs for voice calls on their network by up to 20%. This is for their pre-paid customers, who form a major chunk of their 117 million subscribers.
The headline tariffs will go up to 1.6 paise per second from 1.5 paisa per second. Subscribers on discounted tariffs will see their bills going up by 20%. The changes will come into effect by April 25.
Gurdeep Singh, the chief executive of the operator's consumer business said that this is a part of their efforts to focus on profitable minutes on their network. “The current tariff hikes are part of our continued efforts to reduce free and discounted minutes, and offset the ever-rising costs of input materials. We expect revenues per minute to improve over the next few quarters and this will impact our performance positively,” he said.
The dual-technology player which offers both CDMA as well as GSM services, has been under the cloud of a large number of free minutes which were being used by their subscribers. In the last few years, it has been gradually trying to reduce their exposure.
The operator also went through three rounds of subscriber clean-up. In November last year, it deactivated the accounts of 10 million subscribers. It said that these subscribers were unprofitable and have not used their numbers for the last two months. This move made the operator slip in its ranking from being the third largest operator to the fourth largest, after Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular.
RComm's stock went up 1.8% and is trading at Rs 135, as per data available on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
