CANBERRA: Vodafone Hutchison Australia chief executive Inaki Berroeta has weighed in to the war for mobile phone customers, saying the company will use new plans with free international calls and more download data to accelerate the rise of its customer base despite hot competition from Telstra and Optus.
Australia’s third-largest telecommunications provider on Wednesday announced it was revamping its mobile plans with unlimited national calls and text messages for every single pre-paid and post-paid customer. Post-paid customers are those who get monthly bills for their network use.
Customers who buy SIM-only plans worth more than $50 per month and post-paid customers spending over $80 per month will also get unlimited calls to 10 countries including China, India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
“We are growing customers and we are growing revenues,” he said. “This is what we said we were going to do, this is what we wanted to do and this is why our shareholders our quite happy with the way that the business is performing.
“A year ago we were all the way negative and there’s been a dramatic shift in the performance in the business on the back of customer growth … and on the back of the type of customers that are coming to Vodafone [because] they’re data-rich customers that are using their smartphones heavily.”
