“At this time, they are protected by the Judiciary,” said an official source. “Unless the Supreme Court intervenes and suspends the precautionary measure, we regulate, the small and medium-sized ones respect, and the big ones do not,” explained a senior source from Enacom. The agency will enable an increase, but from December, that is, after the elections, of up to 10% for SMEs and cooperatives, and less for large companies. So far, telephone companies have accumulated increases of between 36 and 50% for the case of prepaid service, between 45 and 49% for postpaid service, between 33% and 41% for mixed service, of between 27 and 44% for telephone service, and between 41 and 53% for home internet. In all these cases, the increases authorized by Enacom are between 16 and 21%, so that the increases of the companies are up to 30 points above the official level. In this way, telecommunications companies will seek to end the year tied with inflation. Even so, they will not be able to recover the points lost in 2020 when they were frozen by decree 690. “We ask that they write off 2020, we all lost, and that they do not try to recover in 2021. Anyway, the balance sheets are good for them, because they gained by volume, given that people need connectivity ”, detailed an official source.
Battle
The battle will now go through 2022. Before the elections, there was an idea within the Government to transform Decree 690 into a “mirror” bill, which is approved by Congress, and thus avoid the judicial dispute. The official senator Alfredo Luenzo worked on the initiative. Before the primary elections, Alberto Fernández assured in Tecnópolis: “We are going to make the internet public service.” These days, the idea was almost discarded, because an adverse result in the legislative elections will mean that it will be very difficult to approve that bill in Congress. For this reason, pending the judicial ruling, or a possible definition by the Supreme Court, the Government is deciding how to agree with the companies. The companies ask for a formula that determines increases with an objective criterion, to have “predictability”. The idea was even promoted by the former chief of staff, Santiago Cafiero. However, after the elections, that formula was put on standby. The government sector closest to the Instituto Patria refuses to index increases, in a context of high inflation, in order to have greater room for maneuver when authorizing increases, as is the case with prepaid, which for years have been demanding an increase rate. For telecommunications, there is a strong incidence of the exchange rate, due to investments in fiber. “The DNU is stopped, in 2022 we will continue to climb to piacere,” they described from one of the companies. In any case, the communications chapter, which increased 30.7% accumulated to September, does not have a “strong weight” in the general level, since it weighs below 3%. “It adds an extra pressure for the month in which they rise, but I would not put it as a determining factor of the November number,” described Agostina Myronec, an economist at Ecolatina.
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