“I think it’s a challenging environment but we continue to believe in Romania. This is a very important message from myself and the management team of Deutsche Telekom because what you see in Romania is a huge number of inhabitants and a fantastic degree of education and language capabilities that we all, not only I, continue to believe in the market,” Claudia Nemat, member of the DT Board.
One of the most important investments of Telekom Romania this year will be expansion of the fiber optic network from 1.4 million households to 2 million.
Telekom Romania’s revenue was slightly down last year, falling below EUR1 billion for the first time, while EBITDA margin was almost 20%, compared with 32% to 41% on the other European markets of the group. DT is confident the results can improve, Nemat said.
“I think that we have to have a long breath. (…) But don’t forget where we started from. The Cosmote brand was very, very different. And you don’t change that only in a few quarters.”
Asked whether DT was considering an exit from Romania, Nemat said no.
“No, so we continue to believe in Romania. I think we need to improve, I would also be very happy to find different conditions in the market, but Miroslav Majoros (the new Telekom Romania chief executive officer i.e.) is here to improve the business.”
The Magenta One fixed-mobile service packages, an important bet of Cosmote and Romtelecom after moving to the Telekom brand in September 2014 performed well, Nemat added.
“I am very happy about the takeoff of Magenta One. Right now we have a situation: Romania is actually the country outside Germany where we have the highest number of customers of Magenta One.” The number of Magenta One customers stood at 208,000 at the end of last year.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)