By Matt Smith
Sept 14 (Reuters) - Vodafone Qatar aims to sign upmore customers on monthly contracts to reduce reliance on lesslucrative pay-as-you-go business, as it is squeezed by slowingmarket growth and stiff competition, its chief executive toldReuters.
The company, an affiliate of Vodafone Group, has yetto make a quarterly net profit since it its entry into theQatari market ended state-controlled Ooredoo's monopoly in 2009.
Its losses had been consistently diminishing, but thattrajectory has faltered of late, with its losses increasing inthe past three quarters, year-on-year - a trend CEO KyleWhitehill said was down to a "significant slowdown in the marketin terms of growth".
"That is part of the wider Middle East issue around oil andgas pricing," Whitehill said on the sidelines of a conference inDubai on Monday.
He said pay-as-you-go price cuts by Ooredoo last year, whichforced his company to follow suit, had also hit revenue.
Ooredoo, the dominant force in Qatar's two-player market,has upped the pressure there as the performance of some of itsforeign units has deteriorated, most notably in Indonesia, Iraq,Kuwait and Tunisia.
To counter these problems, Vodafone Qatar will try to sign up more customers on to monthly contracts, said Whitehill. Suchusers typically spend more on telecoms services and are lesslikely to switch provider.
This will "wean us off the dependency on lower value"pay-as-you-go mobile customers, he said.
Of the company's 1.4 million subscribers, just 171,000 wereon monthly contracts as of the end of June.
The CEO added he would also seek to bolster its businessproviding fixed-line services to companies.
The corporate push suffered a blow late last year when adeal to buy state-owned wholesale Internet provider QatarNational Broadband Network (QNBN) fell through under unclearcircumstances.
"The reason it didn't go through was because the governmenthad a change of mind right at the end," said Whitehill. Hedescribed the decision as a "huge handicap", adding it did notmake financial sense for his firm to build a fixed broadbandnetwork itself.
Qatar had 3.31 million mobile subscriptions at the end of2014; mobile penetration is around 146 percent - or 1.46subscriptions per person.
Vodafone Qatar's subscriber market share was 34 percent asof June 2014, according to the most recently available data inits results. (Editing by Pravin Char)