“Romania once again proved challenging, while we’re confident that our investments will pay off in that market as well. (…) we expect the performance to start improving by the later part of this year,” said Michael Tsamaz, chairman and chief executive officer of the OTE group, via which Germany’s Deutsche Telekom owns the controlling interests in Telekom Romania.
The group is accelerating fiber rollout and optimizing 4G coverage. The network cooperation agreement with Orange Romania will enhance its competitiveness in mobile and the utilization of its fiber network.
“We expect our performance in Romania to start improving in the latter part of this year on the back of our investments in fiber, TV and 4G mobile capabilities. We also expect that the revenues will start benefiting from the network cooperation with Orange Romania,” said OTE’s chief financial officer Babis Mazarakis.
Michael Tsamaz added the group was optimistic that a new momentum would take shape in the coming months, partly because of the appointment of a new CEO, Slovakian Miroslav Majoros, who took the position at the beginning of the year.
Telekom Romania’s total revenue fell slightly to EUR984 million in 2015, dropping to less than EUR1 billion for the first time since 2009, when Deutsche Telekom started consolidating results in Romania. The EBITDA margin stood at almost 20%, lower than the 32% to 41% margins of the group on other European markets. The Romanian subsidiary continued to gain ground on the TV segment and progressed on the B2B segment but lost ground on fixed telephony and even fixed Internet service. Telekom Romania’s revenue rose 4.4% to EUR263 million in the fourth quarter, according to Deutsche Telekom.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)