World’s mobile telephone leader Vodafone which bought Turkey’s second largest mobile phone operator Telsim end of year 2005 from TMSF for $ 4.55 billion stated that the company will now use the name “Vodafone” in Turkey. In June 2006 when the company took over Telsim had expressed that until the quality of service gets to a certain level they will not use the name Vodafone and that an unidentified transition period will be lived through. This period seems to rapidly have been completed. The company which has been using Vodafone-Telsim names together since the end of December 2006 will start using only the name Vodafone beginning April 1. General Manager Atilla Vitai answering a journalist’s question said that they have set up adequate number of base stations.
Vodafone arranged concerts and shows to announce the brand change in Turkey. After the tent concert in Istanbul, Kazlıçeşme on Saturday night where 7000 people are expected to turn up, various shows will take place on Sunday in Istanbul, Taksim and the Bosphorous Bridge.
Vodafone Turkey General Manager Attila Vitai, said that during the 10 months transition period they have succeeded in conveying the Vodafone brand to world standards in Turkey and the time to make the change has arrived. Vitai said :
Vodafone is now here. Before us the market was conservative. A single operator had taken hold of most of the market. We came with the aim of shaking off the leader a bit. Vodafone is bringing new concepts to this market in many aspects. We placed the Vodafone logo at our dealers instead of Telsim. In brand awareness Vodafone rose to 60 per cent. Our subscribers will get adapted to this brand very rapidly.
In his speech General Manager Attila Vitai, stated that doubling up the size of new subscribers within the first 3 months of the year to the number of added subscribers in last year’s final quarter shows the trust in the Vodafone brand.
Vitai said that the network quality has also improved and the goals of 0.75 % call fail and 99.5 % of call originating are achieved, thus in customer satisfaction research made for the month of February their customers are more happy for them compared with their rivals. As an explanation to a question Vitai stated that they are not amongst the best Vodafones in the world, but they are not amongst the worst either and they will continue to improve the network
When asked by a journalist about Avea General Manager Cüneyt Türktan’s proposition re infrastructure sharing Vitai replied as such:
I read about this from the press. It would have been better if they shared it with us instead of the journalists.
Vitai’s reply to turk-internet.com’s question about 3G licenses was as follows:
The government did not start the license process yet. We can not say anything without seeing the arrangements and the rules. We also wish to create employment in 3G research development activities. We haven’t got problems in making Research and Development. We bought Oxygen. About 100 people are working. Even our understructure is ready for 3G. The investment to be made for this is not too hard. We came to Turkey for a long term. 3G will be a milstone for us in mobile phone communications..
The most important explanation of the meeting was Vodafone’s abandoning units pricing and transition to minute pricing. General Manager Atilla Vitai said that they wish to ease off the calculations of mobile phone tariffs which have become very complicated in Turkey and informed of 38 New Kuruş tariffs now for everywhere, in other words to other operators or to mobile phones.. Vitai also noted that this price will be valid for 1 year and will not change with inflation.
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