Agents holding 11-digit SIM cards waiting for price increase

Speaking to reporters, Mr. Nguyen Duc Trung, Director of the Telecommunications Department, said that tomorrow afternoon, May 29, this agency will officially announce the plan to convert 11-digit subscribers to 10-digit subscribers after receiving approval from the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Information about the upcoming conversion plan has caused the VIP SIM market to show signs of slowing down. According to aMr. Hung, the owner of a SIM card dealer in Hai Ba Trung, Hanoi, in recent days, some SIM card dealers want to import more goods in large quantities after receiving information that 11-digit subscribers will soon be converted to 10 digits according to the management agency's plan. However, he said that he is currently only selling 11-digit SIMs but not as beautiful as triple numbers, single numbers, or easy-to-remember numbers... priced under 10 million VND. As for the six-digit, lucky numbers, five-digit numbers... he is not currently selling because he expects that after the conversion to 10 digits, the selling price will increase sharply.

"The prices of products over one million VND have increased by about 10%, but we only export to regular customers.Only SIM cards with bad numbers are still traded normally, prices almost do not fluctuate. As for SIM cards with prices higher than 10 million, they are not shipped.including familiar agents", said the dealer.

Beautiful 11-digit SIM numbers are being hoarded waiting for the plan to convert to 10 digits.

Mr. Hung commented that the price of VIP SIM cards with 11 digits after the plan to convert to 10 digits will certainly increase sharply, or even if it only increases by a few percent, the price can change by tens of millions of VND per number. Meanwhile, according to him, the import of new goods from network operators is very strict, so since the beginning of 2018, when there was information that the conversion would be implemented this year, this unit decided to hoard goods, rarely applying promotions to clear goods like before.

"Previously, we occasionally had promotional programs, 5-10% discounts on 11-digit SIMs, but recently we don't need to push sales quickly, so we rarely apply this policy to VIP SIMs, only to numbers priced under 10 million VND," said Mr. Hung.

Mr. Tuan, another dealer, said that for the same VinaPhone SIM, some dealers advertised the price at 350 million VND before Tet, and a few days ago it was 400 million VND. By May 27, the dealer's selling price had increased to 420 million VND. However, currently, dealers do not want to sell the goods because with numbers like this, if converted to 10 numbers, the selling price can increase by hundreds of millions.

"The price will definitely not go down when switching to 10 digits, but when it does, it will go up by tens to hundreds of millions of dong," he said, adding that he currently has about 50 11-digit SIMs in stock that cost over 10 million. However, he has no intention of selling them at this time.

11-digit subscribers have been officially granted to network operators by the management agency since 2007. However, up to now, the Ministry of Information and Communications has determined that, according to recent statistics, the efficiency of using 3-digit mobile network codes (starting with 1xx) is much lower than that of 2-digit codes (starting with 9x). In addition, the rate of phone subscribers using 1xx network codes leaving the network is quite high. Spam SIMs, spam messages... also mainly arise from 1xx network codes. Therefore, converting 1xx network codes to new 2-digit network codes not only creates fairness in dialing length for service users but also contributes to limiting the rate of subscribers leaving the network, limiting spam SIMs, spam messages...

The plan to convert and unify mobile subscribers to 10 digits is included in the Telecommunications Numbering Plan set forth by the Ministry of Information and Communications in Circular 22, issued in 2015. According to this plan, in 2017, when the re-planning of fixed area codes is completed, the management agency will proceed to convert 11-digit mobile subscribers to 10 digits. However, the implementation has only now been possible, which is one year behind the original plan.

According to regulations, when changing subscriber numbers, service providers must notify subscribers 60 days in advance on the media, allowing simultaneous calls using the old and new methods within 60 days. During the transition, network operators must ensure that customer communications are not affected.