The revenue of Atlas Telecom Network, the first company that took on Romtelecom on the landline telephony segment in Oradea in 2003 after the deregulation of the market, fell to less than one million euros last year and the company posted losses, reveals a report by its court-appointed administrator, Global Money Recovery (GMR).
“As a continuation of the trend before the start of the insolvency proceedings, the company’s turnover fell by almost 40% in 2011 compared with 2010. Besides operating revenue, the company also made financial revenue almost entirely from exchange rate differences,” GMR report says. “Although this revenue is higher than the operating revenue, the total revenue of the company is lower than in the previous year and lower than the total expenses, so that the 2011 too ended in losses.”
The founder and owner of Atlas is Pompiliu Tripa, an Oradea-born Romanian who lived in the United States for a number of years and then came back in the nineties. He is known locally mainly for his impressive luxury car collection, which is worth more than one million euros. Tripa developed Atlas Telecom with over EUR40 million borrowed from OTP Bank.
After launch, Atlas Telecom’s customer base rose to about 16,000 in 2006, and then the operator could no longer cope and decline started. The court-appointed administrator blames Atlas Telecom’s failure on the crisis, the competition and the very long sale talks with a national communications operator, which eventually fell through. GMR had written in a previous report that the operator in question had been Orange.
What is the plan now? GMR says the main goal is to keep Atlas Telecom’s more than 3,500 kilometers of communications infrastructure operational and to sell the entire company for at least EUR5.3 million. The reorganization chances are “uncertain” the administrator says, but if the company were to go bankrupt, everybody would stand to lose. That would be because the maintenance and operation system of the network would break down so that the value of the network would plunge and become just a number of elements worth less than they were as parts of a whole.
GMR believes that even though the prospects of a rebound of the company on its own are uncertain, it should go through reorganization, so that selling the network – equipment, technologies, licenses, would generate more money than selling some parts of it separately.
If the reorganization plan is implemented and a buyer willing to pay EUR5.3 million for Atlas Telecom is found, the company will repay only a small part of its debt over several years, while the government, the employees and most of the creditors will not get any money back.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)