COMPETITIVE prepaid services for individual customers and post-paid offers for business clients marked the November 5 launch of Bulgaria's third GSM operator, Vivatel.

Vivatel is a subsidiary of the Bulgarian Telecommunication Company (BTC), which was privatised in 2004 by Austrian-based consortium Viva Ventures, led by US investment fund Advent International.

"We managed to sell 10 000 SIM cards only on the first day, which showed us that Bulgarian customers were anticipating our launch and the lower prices we offer and they deserve," Richard Shearer, executive director of Vivatel, told a news conference on November 6.

According to Stanislava Arnaudova, head of the 2be chain of stores, which is the main distributor of Vivatel, they sold 5 000 cards on November 5. This was the day the GSM operator activated its network and started selling prepaid cards to individual customers.

The starting package for the prepaid service costs 20 leva, and offers the SIM card plus call minutes for the same amount of money. The tariff is 0.37 leva without VAT, or 0.444 leva with VAT, a minute. The minimum charged time is 30 seconds.

The price is uniform for calling every other network in this country, including BTC's and other fixed networks and the competitive GSM operators, MobilTel and GloBul. The cost of an SMS is 0.16 leva without VAT.

For comparison, MobilTel and GloBul charge between 0.39 and 0.49 leva (VAT excluded) a minute on their prepaid calls.

Vivatel also announced the launch of a promotional campaign, under which, on January 7 2006, customers will be refunded every minute of calls they have made up until that date.

Shearer said the company was the first on Bulgaria's mobile market to launch several services, including prepaid roaming and GPRS, prepaid business packs, as well as free content to download, including logos, melodies and screensavers.

"We see that the competition are now scratching their heads, and we intend to keep on making them do it," Shearer said. In his view, prices of mobile services in Bulgaria have been pretty high and it was time for the third operator to appear in order to push these prices down.

Vivatel also started its first subscription, or post-paid, services, but only for business subscribers. Initially two tariff plans are offered. One is with a subscription fee of 12 leva with VAT, which has 50 free minutes of calls included. The second is with an 18-leva fee and has 100 free minutes.

After exhausting their free minutes, subscribers will pay 0.18 leva without VAT for a minute under the first tariff inside the Vivatel network and when calling fixed lines, and 0.39 leva without VAT when calling other operators. For the second package, the corresponding prices are 0.15 leva and 0.35 leva without VAT.

Post-paid packages for individual customers would be offered soon, Shearer said.

His company's calculations have shown that businesses will be able to cut the cost of their mobile calls by an average of 11 per cent, compared to what has been offered so far by the competitive operators. For households, this cut will be by an average of eight per cent.

Vivatel offers roaming service to 346 operators in 138 countries.

BTC executive director Dennis Wallach told the same news conference that for the first time, Bulgarian subscribers would get prices close to those on the Western European mobile market.