Orange (France Telecom), one of the largest communications providers in Europe will continue investments in Romania this year and one of the items on its agenda this year is the auction for cell phone licenses in Bucharest, Benoit Scheen told ZF in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week.
Scheen said that as far as Orange knew, the auction should be organized this summer and the company would definitely submit a bid considering it is a powerful player on the Romanian market.
The biggest mobile communications license auction ever organized in this country is scheduled for mid 2012 and could generate EUR0.5 billion in revenue for the government from the operators that will compete over the right to provide telecom services on the local market for the next ten to fifteen years.
The government will auction both 4G licenses for frequencies that should be cleared by the Army and licenses for the 900 MHz band, first awarded in 1996, for which Orange, Vodafone and Cosmote’s rights are due to expire.
Orange is leader on the Romanian telecom market by revenue, customer number and profit. The company ended 2011 with EUR937 million in service revenue and more than 10 million customers. Its 2010 net profit stood at EUR222 million, according to Finance Ministry data.
Orange is currently conducting investments on the local market directed to the network and the support center working for other branches of the company, Scheen said. He added that the company was replacing old equipment to enable an easier shift to the 4G (LTE) technology in the future.
Will the communications market return to growth this year? It is all up to the trend of the economy, Benoit Scheen said. After a difficult period for all players on the Romanian market, he hopes the market would at least stabilize this year. If the economy grows by 3% or 4%, then we definitely see stabilization, the Orange executive said.
The communications market stood at EUR3.63 billion in 2010, down 6.6% on 2009 and went down in 2011, as well, according to telecom regulator ANCOM.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)