Ioannidis’ term also overlapped with an ongoing restructuring of the company, prompted by internal weaknesses, errors from the past, and the tough competition with extremely fast-moving operators such as Romania’s RCS&RDS.
When he arrived in Romania in February 2007, Ioannidis had already spent 32 years working for Greece’s OTE group and was taking the reins of a company that was losing as many as 200,000 clients per quarter at times and had barely entered the satellite TV and Internet markets.
After three months, Ioannidis came up with a new executive team, recruited from international markets and not just from among the managers who worked in OTE’s offices in Athens, a new commercial offer and also with the first answers in Romanian to some questions.
The swiftness he showed in the first months and attention to communication and the relationship with the media proved to be two constants of Ioannidis’ term, also transmitted to the other members of the top management team.
Of the series of rapid moves, with which Ioannidis surprised the market, the launch of NextGen – an independent cable company started silently in 2008 to effectively compete with RCS&RDS and neighborhood networks, is worth mentioning. Another major move was the recruitment of Ovidiu Ghiman, RCS&RDS’ commercial manager, in 2009.
Romtelecom managed to win a mobile communication license, which was used to launch mobile data and voice services. The company also became more aggressive in sales and gained a strong presence on the business segment, where it started winning major accounts, together with Cosmote.
Romtelecom launched new initiatives on the content and Internet segments: its own sports and entertainment channels, as well as an online store and portal that provides access to movies and live TV broadcasts.
The company also dramatically changed its interaction with clients: it changed the organization of call-centers and launched an online portal through which users can manage services, acquire new products and pay bills by banking cards.
During Ioannidis’ term, Romtelecom and Cosmote got closer,
launching offers and approaching together retail and corporate
clients.
Ioannidis’ term was a challenging one from the first to the last
day: the company cut the rate at which it was losing fixed
telephony clients, but the decline continued and prices and profit
margins followed the same downward trend.
Last year, Romtelecom’s landline telephony revenue dropped by almost 40% from 2007, while the number of clients fell by 20%. The company has 2.2 million TV and Internet clients but revenues and profit margins are much lower. Under the circumstances, restructuring moves were made each year and several thousand people left.