RIYADH, 26 June 2007 — Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) is set to launch a high-value promotion targeting its prepaid customer base, company spokesman Humoud Al-Ghobaini said in a statement issued yesterday.

“We will continue to prove to the market that we are pioneers. You wait and see what we have in store in the coming few days,” he said.

Short of disclosing the details, he said the promotion would include features never seen before in the Saudi mobile market.

“We launched ‘Khatti and Khatti Plus’ a few months ago with the goal of providing customers with a low and unified tariff for calling any national destination, whether that be calling inside our network or making calls to the other operator’s network,” he said.

“The unified tariff means that our customers do not need to pay double the price when calling their friends on other networks, as the case with other operators,” Al-Ghobaini pointed out.

Customers can check for themselves by going through their monthly bills, he added.

The two offers come as part of Mobily’s continuing innovation, he said.

“The month after Khatti and Khatti Plus, we broke the mould by launching three extremely high-value broadband mobile Internet bundles, one of which was an unlimited package for next,” the spokesman said.

In mid-May, Mobily launched three data bundles based on HSDPA (short for high-speed downlink packet access), a 1GB bundle for SR100 per month, a 5GB bundle for SR200 and an unlimited bundle for SR350.

Due to staggering pent up demand for broadband, Mobily sold out its Connect Cards, special HSDPA modems in record time, and had to backlog orders for three weeks, as the company imported more HSDPA modems now available at its showrooms.

“We knew there was demand for the product, but we just never really knew that demand was so huge until we launched our data bundles,” he explained.

Mobily was the first Saudi operator to offer prepaid customers a slew of basic and value-added services, previously only available to the postpaid customer-base.

Al-Ghobaini promises that the coming prepaid promotion will follow along similar themes and add more value.

“We will continue to prove to the market that we are pioneers. You wait and see what we have in store in the coming few days,” he said.

Today, Mobily’s prepaid customers can roam in over 80 countries, have access to Mobily’s high-value data bundles and other services available to its postpaid customer base.

“We see no difference between our prepaid and postpaid customer base. All of our customers are valuable and we treat them as such,” he said.