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)