The Romanian economy is growing, which is good for the telecom sector. Companies understand they need to do more and more intelligent business and use the ever expanding information technology capacities, said Ovidiu Ghiman, chief commercial officer business segment with Telekom Romania, the largest fixed and mobile communications group on the market.
“Retail, transportation, medical and financial services. These are the early adopters. Large companies are more open to innovation. Small companies continue to have a significant focus on cost cutting and on the problems of their businesses.”
“There are some industries, which adopt the digitalization trend earlier. There are a lot of solutions on the market, but when we start to look at specific solutions, things change. The distribution and financial services industries are among those industries that are faster to adopt solutions combining IT and communications,” said Valeriu Nistor, enterprise business unit director with Vodafone Romania.
“Vodafone set out to integrate IT and communications services into a single platform. We want to grow this area, because we will shortly be talking about a single industry. The most used solutions on short term in our opinion are video surveillance, fleet management and digital media signage.”
“Smartphone and mobile Internet penetration is different between large and small companies. We have a penetration of less than 50% in companies with fewer than 50 employees. As the size and financial strength of the company increase, so does the need for collaboration solutions, and penetration reaches more than 80%,” said Florin Popa, business to business director with Orange Romania.
“We will be working on digitalization solutions and will see a rise in smartphone penetration among small and medium-sized enterprises, but the progress won’t be very fast. SMEs will go for services in the next three to five years, we will see software solutions take off,” said Valentin Popoviciu, RCS&RDS vice-president.
“It is obvious this growth stems from the rise in penetration and number of devices on the market. We are at the beginning of a healthy growth that comes from the use of new applications. Increased Internet usage led to ways of conducting one’s business differently. Two or three years ago it was difficult to access one’s company’s data remotely. Now things are much easier,” Orange’s Florin Popa explained.
One of the main trends of the mobile market in 2015 compared with 2014 was the accelerated increase in 4G connections. A second trend was users moving from pre-paid to post-paid solutions, because of the Internet. A third trend had to do with the increase in mobile service usage on all segments, including text messages and roaming, said Catalin Marinescu, chairman of telecom market regulator ANCOM. He also expects 2016 to be a year of growth for the local telecom industry.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)