Skip to main content

Cellphones Can Seriously Damage Your Pocket

Albania has only two mobile phone operators - AMC and Vodafone. The absence of competition and effective government regulation leads to the inevitable. If I want to phone an AMC mobile from my AMC mobile it costs me 35 Lek per minute. If I want to phone a Vodafone mobile it cost 75 Lek.

To put that in more familiar terms, AMC to AMC costs 20 pence (GBP), 28c (EUR), or 36c (USD), while AMC to Vodafone costs 42 pence (GBP), 61c (EUR) or 77c (USD). You will not be surprised to hear that Vodafone's charges are exactly the same.

It was in protest against these charges and the informal cartel that keeps them at these extortionate levels that the Albanian Coalition Against Corruption organised a protest campaign. One of the posters I featured on a previous post was part of that campaign.


Under the slogan Cellulari Dëmton Rëndë Xhepin, they called on cellphone users to switch them off for an hour on 8th June. The Coalition claimed that 75% of the 300 cellphones they called during the protest had been switched off.

It was a good idea, but it is hard to see it succeeding. With no serious competition, people have nowhere else to go. With no government regulation to break up informal cartels and complex monopolies the companies really have nothing to fear.

Instead they can go on proclaiming their commitment to consumer choice and the market while acting exclusively in their own interests through their anti-competitive practices.

The poster in the photograph above is in my possession since I liberated from a tree downtown. If anyone would like it I can post it to you for 75 Lek per mile.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Just to add a little bit of info; it doesn't really help that both companies are Greek owned. The Greeks are really good at arm twisting.

Ll.T.
Anonymous said…
With reference to the above comment, Vodafone in Albania may still have Greek senior management, but Vodafone in Albania is owned by Vodafone Group PLC - a United Kingdom based Public Limited company in which anyone can buy shares.
The PC said…
Greek owned-Greek managed

tomato-tomaato

The twig is bent.
Anonymous said…
Regarding post #2:

"Vodafone Albania is the second largest mobile operator in the country. It is majority owned by Vodafone Group PLC, the UK-based global wireless operator, and is managed by its subsidiary Vodafone-Panafon S.A., the Greek mobile telecoms company"

http://www.ebrd.com/new/pressrel/2004/21feb17.htm

Now, we can discuss here all day long (we're known for doing that) but I seriously doubt that the holding company in Britain really deals much with V Al. In that sense, V-P controls (read "owns") V Al.

We can all start buy shares in V PLC but with a current market cap of $123.6 B it would take a long time to get controlling interest :)

Popular posts from this blog

Dy Rame Per Tirane

I was watching Top Channel last night, first the news, then Fiks Fare. According to them Tirana's citizens now have a choice not only between Rama and Olldashi, but also between Rama and Rama. A minor right-wing faction, Parti 'Balli Kombetar' , submitted papers to the election authorities registering their candidate, Akile Rama. The people on Fiks Fare got hold of the papers and sent a reporter and camera team to the address listed for Mr A Rama. After much ringing of the bell the gate was reluctantly opened by a middle-aged woman who refused to speak to the reporter and tried to close the gate on her. Back in the studio Saimiri and Doctori - the two presenters of Fiks Fare - revealed that Mr Akile Rama was 73 years old, in hospital, and did not know he was now a candidate for mayor. They also compared two documents - the papers submitted on his behalf, and a genuine document he had signed. The signatures were not even remotely similar. There was an interview with the lea

Albania and the Perils of the 21st Century

Another article on religion in Albania appeared yesterday. Patrick Poole, writing in the American Thinker , argues that Saudi funding for the construction of mosques and the training of imams is a threat to Albania, since these mosques and imams reflect the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia.

Guide Turistike

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council , the future is bright for Albania. The Council ranks Albania ninth out of 174 countries for tourism growth over the next ten years. A summary of the Council's report is available, as is the full report complete with many pages of graphs, charts and spreadsheets. This summer I have seen a number of tourists on the streets of Tirana. Some of them may well be Albanian expats, or people of Albanian descent returning home to visit family, but others are genuine 'foreigners'. Judging from their appearance, they are probably best described as 'independent travellers' - the kind of people who are not interested in luxury hotels or crowded beaches. This is a good start, but independent travellers are not the kind of big spenders that the tourist industry likes. In the longer term, if Albania wants to bring in the kind of free-spending tourists who currently holiday in Croatia or Slovenia, there will have to be a huge invest