E A P E R EG REWG K ICK -O FF M EETING 4 July, 2016 Vilnius, Lithuania G EORGIA – I NTERNATIONAL R OAMING M ARKET Mzia Gogilashvili Strategy Development department

Regional Roaming Market View Total number of Mobile subscribers - 4,858,313 Total Outbound Roamers in ,351,452 Total Outbound Roamers to EaP Countries in 2015: 333,852 – 25% of Total 2

Number of Outbound and Inbound Roamers Georgia – EaP Countries (2015 year) Georgia – EaP CountriesOperator's share 3

Balance Between Georgia and EaP Countries Inbound Roamers exceeds ≈ 9.5 Income from Inbound Roamers exceeds ≈ 5 4 Number of Inbound Roamers 1,898, Number of Outbound Roamers 200, Income from Inbound Roamers 6,368, Income from Outbound Roamers 1,319, However, GNCC concerns about the level of consumer’s roaming charge and unexpected, large roaming bill.

Prepaid Tariffs on Regional Roaming Retail Services The majority of roamers make calls to home country: To provide competitive roaming offers, Georgian operators set exclusive discounts and innovative tariffs on individual visited operators network but relevant Radio network is not always accessible for visitors. 5

Call rounding per minute 6

According to these two bills: Real connection time – 25 sec and 127 sec; Charged connection time 60 sec and 180 sec; Tariff for incoming call was: 1.5 Gel Total charge of this service : Gel (instead of 3.8 Gel per second bases) It could be 37% cheaper 7

Consumer Protection and Transparency warning systems (“welcome SMS”) and informative websites have been developed to ensure consumers to understand their usage; Data usage limit is not reached in every individual case; – Visited operator should grant the Near real time access to the information to the home operator; – Pre-paid platforms such as CAMEL should be implemented; 8

Key challenges to reduce the cost of providing roaming services in EaP Region: International gateway monopolies The international call component is a very important element in roaming calls; prices on routes with monopolized international gateways will continue to remain high; prices on international routes within the region are asymmetrical; Shall we adopt the EU model and impose the wholesale price caps on roaming services when environment and regulations in EaP region is different? 9

Key challenges to reduce the cost of providing roaming services in EaP Region: Double Taxation The visited country’s government might add a non- resident income tax or other tax to the wholesale roaming service; The home country’s government might add a VAT to the retail price for the service. Since 2008 Georgia has been initiating and signing DTA agreements with its major trade partners; however there are some countries (e.g. Moldova) Georgia has not signed such agreement yet. 10

Mobile roaming in EaP Region Regulatory Intervention Promotion of competitive activity in roaming market: – International termination rates; – Steering of roaming and Anti-steering of Roaming techniques; – Per second call rounding; – Near real time access.

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