Tele2 and Beeline do not want to reduce prices for SMS-mailing

T2 Mobile (Tele2) and Vimpelcom challenge one of the decisions of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia in court. In April, the FAS proposed to prohibit cellular operators to charge SMS traffic for each customer of mailings separately. This means that they will just have to reduce discounts on SMS.

However, the FAS made such a decision not from scratch: Sogaz-Honey and the National Processing Center complained about the increase in the cost of SMS mailings:

In the summer of 2013, sending one service sms cost “Sogaz-medu” at 0.03 rubles, then at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 - already at 0.75 rubles. From October to December 2014, SMS sending to MegaFon numbers went up for end customers by 105–116%, the cost of sending to MTS numbers increased by 167–177%. Tariffs for distribution in the Vimpelcom network have increased by 77% since May 2015.

FAS also learned about the growth in the cost of mailings to the Tele2 network by 33%.

At the end of 2013, the provisions of the Law "On Communications", aimed at combating SMS spam and prescribing the identification of mailing lists customers, came into force. Aggregators had to allocate traffic to individual customers and pay operators separately for sending each of them. But the introduction of customer-service accounting for SMS traffic has led to an increase in prices for end customers.

In 2016, the Russian mobile operators earned 14 billion rubles on SMS mailings against 11 billion rubles in 2015, follows from the AC & M-Consulting report.

Having studied the materials, the FAS recognized MTS, Vimpelcom, Megafon and Tele2 as dominant in the Russian SMS information market. Operators will again have to change the charging, if they can not defend their position in court.

SMS distribution is one of the main directions in the business of mobile operators. The demand for them is growing, as small and medium businesses increasingly use them as a tool for interacting with customers, iks-consulting analyst Maxim Savvatin points out. At the same time, revenues from inter-subscriber SMS fall: communication flows into instant messengers, social networks and other services.

Customers of mailing lists and SMS aggregators hope that the FAS decision can improve the situation on the market, and the pricing policy of the operators will change, the general director of SMS aggregator i-Digital Anton Baranov told Vedomosti.

Earlier, the antimonopoly service took up a case against VimpelCom, MegaFon and MTS, initiated on grounds of violation of the law on protection of competition. "The basis for the initiation of the case was the statement of a citizen of a synchronous increase in the 4G-modems prices in the Russian Federation", - said the FAS.