CLARO’S parent company, América Móvil (AMX), while it can boast more than 195 million subscribers worldwide, acknowledges that it remains in the Jamaican telecommunications market, very much a ‘new company’.

However, Thursday night the Mexican-owned company announced that it had overtaken British LIME to become the second largest cellular network in Jamaica behind Irish Digicel in terms of ‘active users’. However, both LIME and Digicel refuted Claro’s claim.

Claro says it still targets overtaking Digicel in 2010.

Claro made the announcement during a dinner held at the Hilton Kingston Hotel in New Kingston, used to update the private sector on its progress after its first year of operation, having acquired the existing Oceanic Digital licence and its MiPhone brand before its re-launch as Claro late 2008.

“The results to date, after one year of operating with the Claro brand, we at Claro are pleased to announce this evening that we are now the second-largest mobile provider in Jamaica,” said IT director Colin Webster. “We simply count the persons who, within the last month, voted for Claro by using our service.”

Previously, Claro had reported significant growth in subscribers, including 92,500 in the month of September alone. However, LIME Country Manager Geoff Houston said that despite advertising heavily, Claro’s visibility had not translated into market share.

“We can categorically refute Claro’s claim that they have overtaken us with regards to subscribers,” said Houston. “In fact, we are confident that our customer base is still several times the size of Claro’s. Our customer numbers are increasing and we cannot have an intelligent discussion on claims based on a survey done by a competitor to which we have no access and as a result we are unable to assess its validity.”

However, disclosure and non-disclosure of such numbers remains a contentious issue within the industry.

LIME, which itself claims 700,000 subscribers; Digicel, which claims two million, counter-claimed that Claro has just 200,000 — 20,000 fewer than under MiPhone.

In turn, Claro told Sunday Finance it recorded only 1.3 million Digicel numbers passing through its switch.

“Claro’s claims with regard to its customer numbers are sheer fantasy — and yet another example of Claro being economical when it comes to the truth,” said Digicel CEO Mark Linehan.

Claro advertises as having the cheapest handsets and lowest rates, with pre-paid calls charged at $9.99 per minute across all networks which, said Webster, is enabled by the bulk purchasing power of AMX and the maintenance of low operating costs.

In his speech, Webster addressed his company’s increasingly acrimonious relationship with Digicel. Claro has reached agreement with LIME and Flow over interconnection rates — what one company charges another to terminate a call on its network — but not yet with Digicel.

Claro accuses Digicel of being anti-competitive and using interconnection rates to maintain high rates to make and receive calls to other networks and deter persons from using any network apart from Digicel. For example, it costs a LIME pre-paid customer $8 per minute to call Claro but $4 more to call Digicel.

“In the Jamaican context this has become the lion’s share of costs across networks and the major contributor to high phone rates,” said Webster. “Whilst over the past two years Claro has had reason and objective negotiations with other telecommunications players about the rates that are realistic rates that reflect costs and we have actually agreed, not with one, but two other local providers about our ability to reduce those rates.

“The largest player in our market stands aside and accuses us of collusion. This helps to reinforce our mission to work with the authorities to help them to realise that their role is equal to ours in being able to promote a healthy and dynamic telecommunications arena where consumers can actually benefit from the best possible service at affordable prices.”

Next year, Claro says it will continue to lobby on local number portability — the ability of a user to have the freedom to change provider and carry across their original number. The position taken by Digicel is that the costs of implementing number portability are not outweighed by the benefits, based upon its experience in other markets. Meantime, Digicel has filed a complaint with the Fair Trading Commission alleging collusion by LIME and Claro.