IIPM News Article - Sinners or Saints?

Misstating cellular baseadditions is not their strategy

The summer of 2006 was special for the Indian cellular operators who had rejoiced over the subscriber base approaching the magical 100 million mark and joining the elite league of markets like China, US, Japan and Russia. However, even before the operators could start uncorking the champagne, reports of suspicion over the possibility of tampering of subscriber base reports threatened to spoil the party. A study conducted by the Yankee Research Group reported that Indian operators are inflating subscriber base by 10-20%. This effectively meant that Indian cellular subscriber base is between just 83.3 to 91 million and it would take another 3-5 months before it actually crosses the 100 million mark. According to the report, handset sales were much lesser when compared to the number of mobile connections and the opera again were allegedly taking into account many defunct subscribers for misreporting numbers.

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Source: IIPM Publication , Editor: Arindam Chaudhuri