HK Telecom says customer losses in first half among lower-value brands
Hongkong Telecom says mobile customers lost in the first half of the year were 'lower-value' users and numbers of 'higher-value' subscribers are still climbing.
The company last week revealed it had a net loss of about 30,000 customers between the end of March and the end of September.
HK Telecom was Hong Kong's first mobile operator and remains its most expensive.
HK Telecom's managing director for mobile services, Ross Cormack, would not specify the losses or gains at its three main networks but it appears likely that the downmarket 1+1 brand, using D-amps technology, would have fared the worst.
Mr Cormack said as a whole HK Telecom's mobile services had shown growth since the September figure of 830,000 subscribers.
HK Telecom yesterday became the third of Hong Kong's operators after Hutchison and SmarTone to launch a dual-band service, mixing the GSM and PCS technologies.
It unveiled a series of new offerings designed to help retain and attract customers.
Among these, customers who stay with its business-orientated 1010 service for more than a year will get a 25 per cent airtime bonus and there will be rebates for dropped or unsatisfactory calls.
Mr Cormack said not all customers were looking at price. There were those after value, in terms of service quality.
'Price is a factor in the mix, but it's more important at the 1+1 end than the 1010 end,' Mr Cormack said.
The dual-band network built by Finland's Nokia has features which improve quality of calls and help smooth out traffic flows in busy areas.
The capacity improvement when coupled with another technology called 'underlay-overlay' could enhance network capacity by 70 per cent, HK Telecom said.
In theory the GSM-PCS network could handle up to two million customers.
