The daily top-up average by the subscribers of Bangladesh’s five private mobile phone operators amounts to nearly Tk60 crore, said an official of a value-added services provider.
“The pre-paid users of five private operators recharge their mobile phones with more than Tk53 crore daily. This is over 97% of the country’s total mobile top up,” Mahindra Comviva country manager Reyad Hasnain told a workshop in the city yesterday.
The private operators are Grameenphone, Banglalink, Robi, Airtel and Citycell which use Mahindra service in the mobile phones’ balance recharge. Bangladesh’s state-owned operator is Teletalk which receives the top up service of Chinese company Huawei.
The country’s market currently has 109m active prepaid SIM cards.
Reyad said some banks also now offer online balance recharge service for mobile phone subscribers using Mahindra’s network facility. He added very few of the people are in the post-paid service.
The workshop was jointly organised by Mahindra Comviva and Telecom Reporters’
Network Bangladesh (TRNB) at the Dhaka Club premises.
Mahindra Comviva currently offers telecommunication services in more than 90 countries.
In the past eight years, the telecommunication operators introduced a system of top up sending text messages. Now 14-17m transactions take place in this way.
Reyad said the top up increases during festival times like Eid and New Year celebrations and the transaction figure could go up to 25m daily on such occasions.
Of the total recharge amount, 5-7% is spent for buying data and the rest of the money is used in voice and sometimes value-added services.
Mahindra Comviva’s global head Kamaljeet Rastogi said in 2014 an amount equivalent to 6% of gross domestic product was transacted using mobile money service. The figure is gradually increasing.
Joe Emmanuel, senior manager of Mahindra Comviva, said the Bangladeshi market is coming up with different modern services as the market is getting matured day by day.