LIME said that its prepaid traffic during the three months to June 30 increased by 71 per cent, when compared to the corresponding period last year.

This achievement, beside an 18 per cent increase in average revenue per user, resulted in a 21 per cent year-over-year up turn in mobile revenues. As a result, the gross margin for its mobile business increased by 34 per cent.

“We successfully launched our XL value plans in early May, and after legislative approval of the regulatory changes for which we had been advocating, in June we hit the ground running with historically low mobile rates through our Talk EZ plans,” said Garry Sinclair, LIME Jamaica’s managing director.

The XL value plan offered prepaid mobile customers 27 minutes of free talk time after each three-minute call, free calls between 9:00 pm and 6:00 am and 100 free text messages after sending three text messages.

Talk EZ slashed the cost of mobile phone calls from $8 a minute to $2.99.

Sinclair said the reduced rates led to “very positive activation rates”, increasing the number of mobile subscribers on LIME’s network.

The telecommunications company still managed to incur a $430-million net loss during the review period, albeit smaller than the $1.3-billion loss it reported for the three months to June 30, 2011.