“A disguised price increase”. At the end of the Freebox Ultra announcement conference, Xavier Niel took a dig at his competitors. The boss of Free accuses Orange, SFR and Bouygues of playing with price displays to deceive their customers. We’ll explain it to you.
Making fun of the competition has never scared Xavier Niel. When Free Mobile was launched in 2012, the billionaire described its competitors as “thieves” And ” Crocs “. Aggressive communication which got him into legal problems, but which he still relies on years later.
On January 30, 2024, during the presentation of the Freebox Ultra, Xavier Niel made a lot of fun of SFR. Free rebroadcast an interview with the former boss of SFR, Grégory Rabuel, in which he criticized the 8 Gbit/s of the Freebox Delta. Obviously, a few years later, SFR did the same thing. Xavier Niel then made fun of Orange and Bouygues Télécom, who had displayed the same skepticism, while ironizing about the fact that all these leaders had since left.
At the end of the conference, when the prices were announced, another little sentence was dropped by Xavier Niel: “You will notice a little thing, which is that we kept a promotion for 12 months. Our competitors are doing 6-month promotions, it’s a disguised price increase.” What is he referring to?
6-month promotions, the new technique for operators
Xavier Niel’s little phrase refers to a technique used by French operators since the end of 2023, to which Numerama has often referred in recent months.
“Our competitors are doing 6-month promotions, it’s a disguised price increase”
Xavier Niel, January 30
In October 2023, Orange discreetly reduced the promotional period of its offers, going from 12 months to 6 months. A process which does not increase the display of prices in theory, but which allows Orange to increase the price of certain offers by 3 to 8 euros per month.
In the week following Orange’s announcement, SFR and Bouygues followed the historic operator. All promotional offers from these two operators suddenly increased to 6 months, resulting in a 12-month price increase.
The Freebox Ultra offers include a promotional period of 12 months, which reduces the bill in the first year (and so much the better because some prices are high). These 12 months also allow you to test for longer, while the 6 months of the others make changing operator unattractive (because of cancellation and subscription fees). The good news is that Free seems committed to not using the same method to make more money.
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