India’s second largest mobile company Hutch will be called Vodafone from Friday. The UK based company Vodafone had recently acquired a majority stake in Hutch from Hong Kong-based Hutchison Telecommunication International Ltd and the company was formally renamed Vodafone Essar in July 2007.
“We’ve had a great innings as Hutch in India and today marks a new beginning for us. Not as a departure from the fundamentals that created Hutch, but an acceleration into the future with Vodafone’s global expertise,” said managing director, Vodafone-Essar Asim Ghosh, The popular brand, Hutch, will be transitioned to Vodafone across India. The brand change over the next few weeks will be unveiled nationally through a high profile media campaign.
“This transition is probably the largest brand change ever undertaken in this country and arguably as big as any in the world. It is even larger than our own previous brand transitions as it touches over 35 million customers, across 4,00,000 shops and thousands of our own and our business associates’ empl-oyees,” said Mr Harit Nagpal, marketing and new business director, Vodafone Essar.
Vodafone has operations in 25 countries across five continents and 40 partner networks with over 200 million customers worldwide. Vodafone has partnered with the Essar group as its principal joint venture partner for the Indian market. The Essar group is one of India ’s largest corporate houses.

Tags: hutch, vodafone

It looks like the party for mobile users who were enjoying one of the cheapest tariff in the world is over. The country’s two top mobile operators Airtel and Hutch on Monday increased the local charges within their own network to Rs 1.20 per minute for prepaid customers from Re 1 a minute. This comes days after both the operators had hiked their STD tariff rates.
Other operators like Idea, MTNL, BSNL, Reliance and Tata could raise local rates following the move by Hutch and Airtel. The new tariff will be for prepaid customers for Airtel-to-Airtel and Hutch-to-Hutch calls. The two operators have also increased local SMS rates to Rs 1.20 per message for all users — both prepaid and postpaid — from Re 1 earlier.
Last week Hutch had raised STD rates by 10.41 per cent for its pre-paid users and Airtel had hiked STD charges by 32 per cent for both pre-paid and post paid customers. Prepaid users of Hutch will have to pay Rs 2.65 from Rs 2.40 previously for STD to all other networks and Bharti Airtel’s prepaid and postpaid mobile customers in Delhi region would pay STD rates of Rs 2.65 and Rs 2.40 a minute respectively from Rs 2 earlier.
According to analysts there is pressure on operators to revive their bottom line as revenues from value-added services are not bringing expected returns. Also with the subscriber base increasing, it is difficult to maintain networks to support huge additions of new users without raising tariffs.

Tags: hutch, telecom