Prepaid cards dial sales in campaign

Prepaid cards dial sales in campaign

JAKARTA (JP): Local sales of prepaid subscriber identity
module (SIM) cards for cellular phones increased significantly in
the first week of the official 16-day campaign period, according
to network operators.

Industry workers said people used their handphones more
frequently because they needed to exchange all kinds of
information, ranging from the traffic situation to checking on
family and friends.

"Massive rallies staged by political parties during the
campaign period could spark unrest. This makes the people to be
more uncertain and this urges them to make more calls to their
relatives and families to assure that everybody is all right," V.
Elisawati, communications manager of the Pro-XL prepaid card
issuer PT Excelcomindo Pratama, said on Tuesday.

The election campaign, which ends on Friday, has been
relatively smooth, with no major incidents. People earlier feared
that rivalry among the 48 election contestants would lead to
violence.

An executive of Satelit Palapa Indonesia (Satelindo), another
mobile phone operator, said that phone usage had been unusually
high since the start of the campaign period.

He said the increase in phone usage was more apparent in
prepaid cards than with subscriber billing services.

"A significant increase occurred on May 26, when the sales of
starter packs jumped by 50 percent from the amount sold on May
1," Elisawati said.

They said that the surge in card sales in the last two weeks
had caused a sharp increase in total sales for May.

"We sold about 15,000 replacement cards in May, higher than
the average monthly sales of no less than 10,000 cards, a figure
we maintained since January," the Satelindo executive said.

Satelindo sold 3,000 starter packs of its prepaid Mentari
cards every day, he said.

There are currently about 399,000 active Mentari users with
monthly cellular usage recorded at around Rp 70,000.

The sales of prepaid SIM cards issued by Excelcomindo also
increased during May, Elisawati said.

She told The Jakarta Post the increase was also more
significant in the sales of replacement cards.

"The total sales for May increased by 15 percent from the
figure in April. Our average monthly sales growth during the
first quarter of 1999 stood at only 5 percent," she said.

Excelcomindo and Satelindo are two of the country's three
Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) providers. The
other one is PT Telkomsel, which also produces prepaid card
products, Simpati.

Dani Buldansyah, another Excelcomindo executive, said the
number of calls made by cellular operators often increased
sharply when there were street rallies in the capital.

Calls made by Excelcomindo's Pro-XL users jumped to about 2.7
million calls from the average daily rate of only 1.5 million
when university students commemorated the Trisakti shooting
tragedy on May 12.

The number of calls also rose significantly on May 28, when
thousands of PDI Perjuangan supporters staged their rallies in
the capital. (cst)