Thailand's mobile phone sector is likely to enter a new growth cycle this year after facing three years of sluggish expansion due to overheated competition, major operators said. But the tariff price war, particularly in the prepaid segment, appears set to drag on as operators use matching-rate promotions to keep their customer bases, a Bangkok Post report said. Third-ranked TA Orange set the price-cutting pace last year and forced similar responses from its two larger rivals. Executives all say that price-cutting hurts the industry by squeezing profits and leaving less money for service expansion, but no company wants to be the first to stop if it means losing customers. Operators are optimistic that the number of new mobile-phone users will increase by between 4 million and 5 million in 2006. Sigve Brekke, CEO of DTAC, said the cellular market had low growth in 2005 because operators were focusing on rate-cut competition, instead of creating innovative services. The resulting was that promotion-seeking customers hopped from one operator to another and brand-new customers were few by comparison. DTAC expects to gain between 1.2 million and 1.7 million new users in 2006. The company had a total of 8.8 million subscribers at the end of 2005, about double the number of TA Orange users. Market leader AIS, meanwhile, expects to attract an additional 1.3 million subscribers, bringing its total to 17.3 million in 2006. Full article Telecom Asia