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According to Nguyen Minh Son, head of the Finance and Planning Department under the Ministry of Information and Communications, telecom providers are forced to place deposits as a guarantee for their project implementation.
If a telecom provider fails to implement its commitments, it will be charged a penalty of 3% of its deposit.
The total deposits of the four 3G providers are VND8.1 trillion, with VND4.5 trillion from Viettel, VND1.5 trillion from each of MobiFone and VinaPhone, and VND600 billion from Hanoi Telecom-EVN Telecom. The deposits have been kept at Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV) and Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development Bank (Agribank).
The ministry has already returned 50% of the deposits to the four after they launched their services.
But now the providers want to withdraw the remainder to facilitate their investment and business expansion, citing monetary tightening policy as the main reason for difficult access to bank loans.
Hoang Trung Hai, vice director of VinaPhone, said his firm had completed the deployment of its 3G service, so now it wanted to take back the deposit. Sharing this view is Nguyen Dang Nguyen, vice director of MobiFone, which will have completed its 3G investment by the year’s end.
However, a representative of EVN Telecom said the company had invested VND3 trillion to deploy a 3G network. Only 20% of this capital is the enterprise’s own money while the rest is from loans.
EVN Telecom requires an early deposit reimbursement due to the difficult economic situation.
Hanoi Telecom General Director Trinh Minh Chau suggested a partial deposit reimbursement in case a complete one is not approved. Chau said if the ministry did not allow early withdrawals, both 3G providers and the Government would be affected because all telecom enterprises are State-owned.
In response to these proposals, Le Xuan Cong, head of the information ministry’s Science and Technology Department, admitted they were reasonable requests. Still, he added the ministry only returns deposits after three years to guarantee quality of service.
Cong said 3G deployment progress and service quality is okay at the moment but in three years’ time there will be an increase in the number of subscribers.
Son said the ministry would consider suitable deposit reimbursement in certain periods. However, the ministry must retain some of the deposits for possible penalties even though there have been no violations so far.
As of 2010 there had been more than 30,000 base transceiver stations and eight million 3G subscribers nationwide, said Nguyen Phong Nha, deputy head of the ministry’s Telecommunications Department. Over 98% of phone calls via 3G service had been made successfully and mobile Internet access had reached 7.2 megabytes per second.
Source: SGT
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