Terming the present market highly competitive, the official said the current competition puts pressure on reducing call charge.

Stein Naevdal, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Grameenphone, yesterday shared his views at an interactive session with a group of journalists at a city hotel.

He said Grameenphone is continuing its business growth as it registered the 14 million subscribers mark just a week ago.

"The business growth is there and in an internal analysis we found that the subscribers base will touch 50 million at the end of 2009," the CMO said.

Grameenphone pre-paid service dominates the subscription market contributing 95 percent, while only 5 percent customers subscribe the post-paid service.

Naevdal said the average per minute tariff has come down to Tk 1.4 at the end of March this year from Tk 6 in 2004.

He claimed that the average tariff level dropped by 74 percent during the last three years.

Grameenpnone is planning to invest more in popularising data transfer service through mobile, the CMO said, adding that there is a huge demand for data transfer service in rural areas.

The company also planned to popularise SMS services, as, according to a Grameenphone analysis, usage of SMS is the lowest in Bangladesh compared with other countries.

He said despite constant price challenge in the market, the company will do better in terms of market share due to better customer services. The company is currently running 600 customer service centres across the country covering almost all the upazilas.

The market share of the company was 61 percent at the end of March this year.