Somprasong said while he has yet to obtain an official figure for new subscribers in March, he had learned that business sentiment improved remarkably last month.

"There are signs that a number of clients have come back to us," he said.

AIS earlier suffered a hostile reaction after the Shinawatra family sold Shin Corp, which owns AIS, to Temasek Holdings, an investment arm of the Singaporean government. The sale prompted a number of users to dump AIS SIM cards and turn to competitors such as Total Access Communication (DTAC) and True Move.

In February, for instance, AIS saw only 30,000 net new subscribers, against an average rate of more than 100,000 new subscriptions monthly. By comparison, AIS in January recorded 190,000 new net subscribers.

"We faced four negative factors," Somprasong said. "They were the cutthroat campaign from competitors, a cloudy political sentiment, an economic slowdown partly due to oil prices, and sentiment against AIS after Shin's sale to the Singaporean government."

When the news first broke, a number of AIS clients tore up their AIS SIM cards to show their disapproval of the sale amidst rising nationalist sentiment. However, now the public negative feeling about the Shin sale has subsided and a number of clients have returned to AIS.

Three of the factors are gone, leaving only the ongoing economic slowdown because of the oil crisis. "It's uncertain whether the oil price rise will have any impact on mobile-phone businesses. Maybe or maybe not," he said.

"We still hope to achieve the original target of 1.2 million new subscribers this year," he added. AIS has 16.5 million clients, making it the market leader.

Earlier, other mobile-phone operators conducted fierce marketing campaigns including price-cutting to lure clients from AIS. The campaigns enabled the other operators to increase their client numbers. The promotions prompted a massive surge in call traffic, resulting in occasional overloads in cellular networks to the point that users were unable to reach one another. However, Somprasong said some users had already complained about problems with the network, especially when users had to call others on a different mobile network.

"Therefore we are trying to improve our service. We have invested US$200 million [Bt7.5 billion] so far this year to expand our networks. This is almost half of $450 million, the amount we planned to invest in network improvement for the whole year," he said.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation