BANGALORE -(Dow Jones)- India's Vodafone Essar, a unit of UK's Vodafone Group, is unlikely to get hurt financially after India's telecom regulator asked it to refund the charges it levied on consumers for activating value-added services without their consent, analysts said.
Late Thursday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or TRAI, directed Vodafone Essar to refund to all consumers, within 15 days, the charges levied for value-added services in cases where they were provided without explicit consent.
TRAI however didn't specify the amount to be reimbursed.
"The amount should be insignificant. Value-added services make up only about 7%-8% of the company's total revenue, and of that (7%-8%) about 80% is from SMSes, so what is left," said Brijesh Rajvanshi, an analyst at Mumbai-based Networth Stock Broking.
"Also, only a minority of value-added services users would have complaints," he added.
For mobile phones, value-added services refer to all services beyond standard voice calls. Technologies such as SMS, multimedia messaging services and services to allow access to the Internet are considered as value-added services.
TRAI however didn't specify which value-added service it was referring to.
Madhavendra Das, a Vodafone spokesperson, said in a statement: "Value-added services were activated by Vodafone only after receiving explicit instructions from customers over voice, SMS or interactive voice response records of which were maintained as per requirement."
Unlisted Vodafone Essar is India's third largest telecommunications company by subscriber base.
-By Romit Guha, Dow Jones Newswires; 91-9900181471; romit.guha@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
Posted to the site on 14th March 2008
Posted to: www.cellular-news.com/story/29918.php