All against Claro and Slim: the 10 operators in Colombia unite to stop them



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The silence of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission in the face of allegations of a possible dominant position in the Colombian market led the 27 telecommunications companies to forward the complaint to the OECD based in Paris. The lawsuit has been going on for more than three years.

The communication indicates that Claro holds 59% of the sector’s total income and the rest is distributed among 10 operators. According to the applicants, the abuse of Claro’s position harms competition, which the State is called upon to guarantee. According to Marcelo Cataldo, president of Tigo-Une, “the risk of a monopoly is that if measures are not taken, Colombians could be left with a single option to connect to the Internet, a single tariff option and if they are not satisfied. of the service will have no possibility of change or improvement “.

The operators inform ODCE that in the last six years Claro has invested only 15.7% of its total income, 15.9% in mobile phones and 15.4% in landlines, when the other operators have invested between 18 % and 21%. Note that the president of América Móvil, Juan Carlos Archila, owner of Claro Colombia, responds by stating that 60 out of 100 pesos of money invested in the sector comes from Claro.

Since 2016, Tigo and Movistar have filed a complaint with the Superintendence of Industry and Commerce – SIC, which responded last year considering there was no evidence of Claro’s dominance in the mobile services market.

The position of the OECD is different. In October last year he reiterated his vision of concentration in the Colombian telecommunications market and explicitly recommended promoting competition in the fixed and mobile markets. According to the document Towards digital For Colombia, the lack of competition translates into higher prices, for example, a fixed high-consumption Internet package in Colombia costs 2.5 times what is paid on average in other OECD countries. A report by Analysys Mason also indicates that Colombia pays twice as much for 1GB of mobile data than other countries in the region. What limits the connectivity levels of Colombians. It is based on this statement, is that the other companies are turning to the OECD again.

America Movil, owned by Carlos Slim, is the largest and most valuable company in Mexico and the fourth largest mobile network operator in terms of subscriptions in the world. Its subsidiary Telcel is the largest mobile operator in Mexico with a market share of over 70%. In Latin America, the company operates under its Claro subsidiary in several countries, including Jamaica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Colombia and Ecuador.

The CEO of the company is Daniel Hajj, Slim’s son-in-law and right-hand man. The company was born from Telefonos de México – Telmex, a company that Slim acquired during the privatizations of the Carlos Salinas government, Claro is the subsidiary concentrated in mobile telephony. Arriving in the country in 1994 under the name of Comcel for telephony and Telmex Colombia for internet and television, in 2012 it unified the brands under Claro.

Last year it had 28.8% higher profits than in 2018, where Colombia contributes an important share, increasing its subscribers by 101 thousand. In the midst of this pandemic year, the company reported a 39.7% increase in net profit compared to last year’s second quarter and indicated that Brazil and Colombia performed best in terms of mobile revenues, with an increase of the country by 4.8%

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