Uninor, the joint venture between Norway’s Telenor and Unitech, is fighting on two fronts after a Supreme Court verdict snatched its 22 licences to operate telecom services in India.
While it is sweating to salvage operations and secure its mammoth investment, the company is fighting competitors looking to wean away its customers and employees.
Uninor has 38 million subscribers and 17,000 employees in 13 circles where it currently operates.
From calls and SMSes asking its staff and customers to ditch the company to retailers virtually bullying it to stop stocking its pre-paid cards, the challenges are manifold. Even there are posters in circulation that claim Uninor has gone out of business.
“We have taken up this challenge at 3-4 different levels. We are really making sure that our employees don’t take calls when competitors ask them to quit Uninor by making them emotionally pumped up. The second stakeholders are distributors and we are reaching out to all 2,000 of them telling them we are here to stay with a long-term partnership,” Sigve Brekke, Uninor’s managing director and Telenor’s Asia head, said.
West Bengal Uninor, with five million customers, is the largest service provider while in Andhra Pradesh it’s the third biggest with three million connections.
“At the retail level, we are communicating with the distributors with SMSes, e-mails and visiting them almost every second day to ensure that they are with us. The fourth is our customers and we are communicating via text messages, call centres or even calling them up directly and providing different offers to make them stay on,” Brekke said.
The company is hoping that the fresh auction of spectrum takes place in the next four months till it is allowed to operate services and is opposed to allowing incumbents in the fresh auction.
On its partnership with Unitech, Brekke said, “The partner conflict is the last thing we think of right now. We need to secure our Rs14,000 crore investments. We need to secure our future. That’s the focus. Anything else does not matter now.”
Asked whether it would ally with a new partner, he said, “This is not about the partner. This is about Uninor in which Telenor has a 67% stake. Telenor is the one that has invested significantly in the venture and Telenor will drive us to the auction process.”
“You will see us in coming days advertising aggressively about offers telling our customers that Uninor gives the best value for money,” Brekke asserted.
So far, Uninor has latched on to the phrase of value-for-money to differentiate itself from its immediate competitors. In a play of words, it’s been whipping up a one-liner — You lose if we die — to fight its way back into customers’ hearts.
“How come that it is twice as much costly to be a mobile subscriber in Delhi than in Hyderabad or Kolkata? It is because of competition and due to the fact that we have not been allowed to compete in Delhi,” Brekke reasoned.
A tariff ad of 2 paise a minute within Uninor’s network in Kolkata from mid-night to early morning was carried by most city dailies on Thursday.
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