GP’s scrap with BTRC ate up market share

In an unusual development, Grameenphone's active customer number came down to 7.53 crore at the end of March after falling for two consecutive months, as the operator could not get approval to sell new connections for a long time.

Grameenphone began the year with 7.65 crore active customers, but in February and March, the top operator lost 1.58 per cent market share, or more than 11 lakh active users, according to a new report of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).

The loss of customers is a rare incident for the country's top carrier and the BTRC officials who deal with operators could not remember the last time when the number of Grameenphone users dropped for two months in a row.

The operator also experienced a decline in active internet connections.

At the turn of the year, Grameenphone had accounted for 46.18 per cent internet users in Bangladesh. But at the end of the first quarter, its share declined to 45.42 per cent.

Some 4.04 crore Grameenphone subscribers are now using the internet.

Grameenphone faced a scarcity of numbers from the beginning of the quarter that negatively impacted the subscriber base, said Yasir Azman, chief executive officer of the operator, while releasing the January-March quarter financial report, recently. 

"We continued to face challenges in the first quarter of 2020. The restrictions placed on us by our regulator by not issuing NOCs [no-objection certificates] lasted until March, which impacted our planned investment in the country," he added.

As a result, the operator could not sell new connections. It faced the restriction from the middle of last year until March this year involving BTRC's audit claims of Tk 12,580 crore.

After continuous engagement, Grameenphone received approval from the commission on March 12 to recycle numbers available for reselling to meet customers' demand, said Md Hasan, a spokesperson of the operator.

As the top carrier lost some market share while others gained, Grameenphone has come up with new offers and declared free call minutes -- a move that has created caused a ripple in the industry.

However, on the back of overall customers, Grameenphone could manage to increase its 4G users and ended the quarter with 1.42 crore subscribers, up from 1.19 crore at the end of 2019.

The operator has been focusing on enhancing 4G users for the last few quarters. As a result, data consumption by the users rose, said a senior executive of Grameenphone.

Robi, the second-largest operator, ended the first quarter with 4.97 crore active users after it gained some market to take it to 30.01 per cent. Banglalink has 21.43 per cent market share and state-owned Teletalk has 2.90 per cent stake, according to the report.

At the end of March, the total active mobile connections stood at 16.53 crore as of March, according to the BTRC report.