Tariffs will be adjusted gradually
The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) of Russia found the telecom operator MegaFon to have violated antimonopoly laws after the operator increased tariffs for communication services for more than 8.2 million subscribers by an average of 10.24%. The press service of the department reported this. The company has already responded to the FAS statement with a promise to return a number of archival tariffs.
According to the department, the operator initially justified the increase in prices by increasing costs. However, according to the FAS, the operator still did not have sufficient grounds.
At a meeting of the service commission, MegaFon announced that it would reduce unreasonably increased tariffs for its services until February 15, 2024. To this end, changes have already been made to the relevant regulations of the company. The amount of the fine for the telecom operator will be determined during the administrative investigation.
Comment from the MegaFon press service for iXBT.com:
After a lengthy dialogue with the regulator and discussion of its arguments, we actually agreed to return the terms of a number of archived tariffs, changes to which were made in January 2023. The adjustments will come into force gradually; we plan to complete this process completely by mid-February 2024.
At the same time, the process of step-by-step indexation of individual tariffs from the operator’s archive has completely objective reasons, and the total increase in the cost of our services for the entire subscriber base in 2023 was less than 3%.
We will continue the dialogue with the regulator on the very sensitive topic of pricing in the cellular communications market, since with a general increase in costs, it seems impossible to maintain the price level unchanged, especially for those tariffs whose economics were relevant several years ago.