Government especially CASE should not be abetting any of its Government-linked companies like NETS who attempted to increase its fees due to inefficiencies or monopoly.
This kind of monopolistic price increases has happened all too often. It is about time some government ministers form a committee to look into such monopoly which is bad for economic competitiveness or business.
There is a possibility too of an infringement being committed under the Fair Trading Act where cartels and collusions in price hikes or profiteering have been prohibited by law.
Instead of keeping tight-lipped about such monopolistic price increases by GLCs and government agencies, the government should investigate whether there is justification for NETS to use its monopoly to fix or increase prices which is against public or national interest.
If businesses can be prosecuted for unfair trading practices against the public or consumers, shouldn't government linked companies be similarly brought to book for infringements like price fixing or profiteering under the Fair Trading Law.
Should the public or end users be protected or should they be been cornered into paying unfair price increases under the monopoly of any sorts as NETS has enjoyed with the support of the government and its agencies.
First the government should look into the quality and level of service of NETS as a monopoly before even considering its reasons for one-sided increases of fees.
I could recall one incident some three years ago when I had the occasion to use NETS service to install a car park cash card system.
After the promises and signing on the dotted lines, the NETS system was installed but was found to be malfunctioning without any attempts to fix the problems.
Eventually through trial and error by the layman staff, the car park cash card system's malfunction was traced to incompatibility of CPTs being used.
No one from NETS was bothered enough to attend to the problem. The blame was quickly put on the faulty CPTs as being caused by some imperfect manufacturing process.
Why with so many engineers in charge was there no one able to prevent or preempt such manufacturing defects causing days of disruption to the whole cash-card car park system and great inconvenience to the public.
Because of such inefficiencies caused by monopoly status of NETS customers had to suffer in silence. Complaints written to its directors were ignored.
So if NETS were to say its increases were necessary to cover its higher costs of operations, the above-mentioned incident should offer an insight into how such higher costs had occurred - inefficiencies of operations and management due to monopoly.
Obviously hidden inefficiencies were not resolved as shown in its inability to take care of simple manufacturing quality check. Such inefficiencies inevitably due to monopoly are being passed back to the customers and end users by NETS because of lack of competition or supervision.
I will never touch NETS again...
July 1st 2007 is 10th anniversary of the birth of Asian financial crisis.
The question now is will retailers absorb the administrative fee charged? It would make no business sense to absorb. But won't they want to retain their customers? Sure, but note that this is a different sort of price competition.
In a typical price competition, businesses who compete by prices will seek for cost efficiency to enable that kind of strategy. Soon, the other businesses will catch up with the techniques behind that cost efficiency.
With the NETS fee hike, businesses which are more efficient will be able to absorb the fees. But when other businesses play catch up, the cost will eventually get passed on to consumers. Business owners will already know this and hence also know that there's no avoiding the eventual route which is to increase prices for their products. You'll know who are the smarter retailers by when they increase their prices.
ok i use cash next time