Page 47 - IRANRptMar21

9.1.5​ Tourism sector news
Hotel closure rate in Iran has hit 30% amid pandemic says federation
Some 30% of hotels in Iran have shut down since the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in the country in February, the Federation of Hotel Owners has said.
A collapse in bookings and lack of support provided to hotel owners to stay solvent saw many hotels either forced to close or mothball operations, it added.
“The industry has suffered Iranian rial 85tn ($304mn at the free market rate) in losses because of the pandemic and the radical decline in domestic and international travel,” federation representative Jamshid Hamzehzadeh was quoted as saying.
Some 70% of jobs have been lost in Iran’s hotel industry in the past year, with local tourism essentially non-existent on a short-term perspective, he added. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, 240,000 people were directly employed and 550,000 were indirectly employed in the Iranian tourism industry, industry estimates suggest.
9.1.6 ​TMT sector news
Iran to cut bandwidth tariffs by 25%
Twitter suspends accounts of Iran’s oil minister
A 25% reduction in Iran’s internet bandwidth tariffs has been approved by the Iranian Radio Regulatory Authority (RRA), the deputy minister of communications announced on February 1.
The move aims to reduce the end cost to the consumer for both ADSL and mobile fourth-generation (4G) internet, as well as boost investment through increasing take-up of the modern technologies in the country.
Hossein Fallah Joshaghani, head of the RRA told IRNA he hoped major operators Mobile Communications of Iran (MCI), Telecommunications Company of Iran (Mokhabarat) and MTN-Irancell would now pass the cost reduction on to the consumer.
"There is a logic in the world that when consumption goes up, the tariff and price goes down," he said.
He further noted: “Due to the increase in consumption, after evaluation, we reduced the price of bandwidth costs that operators receive from the national infrastructure by 25%.”
Iran remains one of the cheapest countries in the world per megabyte. Per megabyte internet costs are some 80-90% cheaper than they are in regional countries including Turkey and Azerbaijan, with Iranian operators acting as data hubs in recent years for foreign subscribers.
Twitter has suspended the account of Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh.
An Iranian oil ministry official who asked to remain anonymous said that the suspension appeared to be linked to the ​sanctions​ that were in late October slapped on the minister by the US State Department as part of a move to step up action against Iran’s oil industry.
Twitter has not specified why it blocked Zanganeh’s account.
After being sanctioned, Zanganeh tweeted: “Imposition of sanctions on me and my colleagues is a passive reaction to the failure of Washington's policy of reducing [Iran's] crude oil exports to zero. The era of unilateralism is over in the world. Iran's oil industry will not be hamstrung."
He added that he owned no assets abroad, so he would not be impacted by sanctions.
In late September, Zanganeh ​openly admitted​ to forging documents as part of
47​ IRAN Country Report March 2021 www.intellinews.com