Telecom Egypt (TE), Egypt’s second largest listed company, said that its newly introduced unified Domestic Long Distance (DLD) tariff between Egyptian governorates has quadrupled the volume of calls, and added 50,000 new subscriber to TE’s subscribers’ base, Al-Ahram daily newspaper reported.

The landline monopoly had introduced a new intra-governorate tariff of LE0.03 per minute as a limited time promotion to last from July 2011 until the end of September 2011 in order to maintain its market share against fierce competition from the three Mobile phone carriers. However, it has now been decided that this tariff will last indefinitely.

Use of TE's services saw change recently, as the number of fixed line subscribers declined to 9 Million at the end of June 2011, a 4.3 per cent drop from the previous year.

The company posted a 15 per cent drop in its second-quarter results, where it made 2Q2011 net profits of LE826 Million (US$138.8M), down from LE971 Million in the same period the year before, and 7.9 per cent less than in the first quarter of 2011.

Beltone Financial, a leading Cairo based investment bank, expects the recovery in the number of lost subscribers to hold well until the end of 2011, on the back of the extended unification of DLD tariffs.