Comparative data from Eurostat show that the price index for communication services in Albania is 108.4 or 8.4% higher compared to the European Union average.
Other countries in the region have this indicator below the level of 100, which represents the EU average. Northern Macedonia has the lowest value of the index, with 69.6, followed by Serbia with 73.5, Bosnia and Herzegovina with 94.3 and Montenegro with 94.7. Eurostat does not publish data on Kosovo.
Indicators published by the Electronic and Postal Communications Authority (AKEP) also show that in recent years there is a tendency to increase costs for users in the most important market segment, that of mobile communications. The main indicators are the average revenue per minute and the average revenue per user of mobile operators. The 2020 figures for these indicators have not been published by AKEP, but the data until 2019 show a clear upward trend.
The ARPM indicator (average income per minute) for 2019 reached ALL 3.33, increasing for the fourth consecutive year. Compared to a year ago, this indicator increased by about 15%. ARPM comes as a ratio between the revenue from retail services with the amount of minutes exited from mobile networks. This indicator is the average price a user pays for one minute of talk time. By 2015, ARPM had been steadily declining, as a result of increasing competition in the mobile services market.
But after 2016 this indicator started to grow, as a result of the need of mobile operators to improve the revenue base and to support the necessary investments in networks and technology. The increase in costs may have been influenced by a lower competition, after the exit from the market, in 2017, of the fourth operator, Plus Communication.
The ARPM indicator is an alternative way to assess the performance of prices in mobile services in Albania, mainly because communication is not done with standard tariffs, but through offer packages, in which it is difficult to determine an exact price for each communication unit.
The increase in the average price per minute is also reflected in the increase in average annual costs per user. The ARPU indicator (average income per user), which is calculated as the ratio of revenues from retail services to the total number of active users, for 2019 reached 7024 ALL, an increase of 8.3% compared to a year ago. This indicator is also increasing for the third year in a row.
/ Monitor