“I think the key for the operations in Romania is to change the organization culture into one of a challenger (…),” Indian executive Srini Gopalan, the new head of the European operations of Deutsche Telekom, said in a conference in Barcelona and his first meeting with the media since becoming a board member of the German telecommunications giant in January.
Telekom should go out there in the market and make the most of its assets, he added.
To attain these goals the DT subsidiary in Romania and the others in the region must be more aggressive on the market and put the customer experience first to stand out, Gopalan said when ZF asked what the main change he wanted to make during his term was.
Deutsche Telekom has an engineer-type thinking and needs to be more customer oriented. That is the biggest change he would like to see made, Srini Gopalan said.
The situation in Romania where Telekom group’s revenue constantly shrank until it dropped to less than EUR1 billion, while the operating income margin is the lowest of the entire DT group – due to the competition that put pressure on rates, is not something that cannot be fixed, Gopalan hinted. To him Romania is one of the most interesting markets in the group’s portfolio. The business in Romania has not been performing very well, it had many problems in the last five years. Still, Gopalan thinks it now has a new management team and a portfolio of quality assets: 2 million households covered by the fiber network, a really good 3G network and is currently working on developing a strong 4G network.
Telekom Romania is the leader of the fixed telephony segment, a market in decline, and number two on the fixed Internet segment, a market it has been unable to grow on for several years now, despite the overall trend of the industry. It kept its third leading position on the mobile telephony market and managed to boost the number of post-paid contracts. TV services remain its top performer, a segment where it is number two and has seen steady growth in the past few years.
That Telekom has both fixed and mobile operations and country-wide infrastructure is an advantage the management team must make better use of, Srini Gopalan said. This means it has a unique opportunity, unlike most other countries, because those markets have very few challenger operators that have convergent fixed-mobile operations. Challengers normally have mobile operations, he added.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)