Richard MOAT, CEO Orange Romania, announced the launching of HSDPA at 3.6 Mbps and HSUPA by Orange Romania this year, at the Communications Day conference, on May 10, 2007
"First of all, we have 8 million customers today, or 8.271 to be exact, as at the end of the first quarter of 2007.
And Dan Georgescu talked about his disappointment with the fact that penetration was only 80 percent in Romania.
Well, I think it is going to move on strongly this year to very close to 90 percent by the end of the year. 13.30 and probably 100 percent by the end of 2008. So I don't think it will be long before we have caught up with our neighbours in terms of penetration.
Orange has invested 1,2 billion euros in its networks to date in this country over the last 10 years and we are investing a further 200 million euros in 2007.
We believe that has played a big part in helping to drive the growth of mobile telecommunications and indeed growth of the Romanian economy as a whole because I think that mobile telecommunications takes the benefit of economic growth, but it is also a significant driver of economic growth and studies have shown that for every 10 percentage points of population penetration which is achieved, you can actually get something over 1 percent extra growth in GDP.
But it is not just a question of the amount we invested to create our networks. We also are very active in the community 14.33 and we have participated in the initiative which Dan Georgescu refered to earlier, particularly the Universal Service initiative - the creation of something like 53 telecenters in 2006.
And in the first quarter of 2007 that growth continued. We had 283 million euros in revenues, which represented a 29,1 percent increase over the first quarter of 2006.
By the end of this year we forecast that we are going to have 9 million customers or more and we expect a turnover well over 1,1 billion euros.
3G+ and WiMAX in 2007
We currently offer the widest wireless broadband network in Romania, which is a combination of nation-wide EDGE coverage which we achieved in November last year, and (3G).
But we are not going to stop there. Speed is of the essence in terms of access to the various services which we are going to be supplying.
We are going to be going to 3G+, the new software enhancements of 3G, which are going to significantly increase the download and uplink speeds which can be achieved by subscribers.
So we are going to introduce HSDPA at 3,6 Mbps (nu kbps) next month, in June.
And we intend to follow that up by developing it to HSDPA at 7,2 Mbps (nu kbps) in the fourth quarter of 2007 and simultaneously launch HSUPA, which allows uplink speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps.
We are also investing in complementary technologies and one of these is WiMAX. We won a 3.5 GHz WiMAX licence back in 2003. We developed it on a relatively small scale, but this year we have been rolling it out much faster using WiMAX technology itself. We currently have coverage in 10 cities and we are going to be expanding that to 20 cities by the end of this year.
New Business Offer for SMB
And we are also developing a number of different applications for business customers.
We have introduced Business Everywhere, which is a personalized application which allows access to your Internet or your intranet wherever you happen to be.
We have introduced a Day Unlimited data offer which means on any day you access data services you can use them on an unlimited basis for only a charge of 2 euros.
Those are mainly targeted at the corporate customers at the moment and we want to expand the range of customers whom we offer these converged services. We are going to be moving on to offer them to smaller medium sized businesses before the end of this year.
And Machine-to-Machine is another preocuppation of ours. We started with fleet tracking services but we are going to be moving into a number of different areas such as video surveillance, healthcare and the environment.
Synovate-carried research at the end of last year was demonstrating that we were the leaders in the business market in this country.
And we joined forces last September with the business formerly known as Equand under the single banner of Orange Business Services. Together we intend to provide the most comprehensive solution to corporate customers and smaller medium sized business customers in this country. So basically, not only offering mobile, Internet, but also managed solutions for that customer.
New Music Content Offer
(On the consumer side) we have our Music Store which allows 250.000 full track downloads. And that has been put together in association with some of the major international players through deals the group France Telecom has done: Sony, BMG, Warner, Universal, EMI, but also with local players and footprint.
And I would also like to announce today a new proposition which we are launching, PrePay Music. We believe this is a very unique proposition in the market. It consists of a unique prepay offer, a Web WAP mobile portal, a radio station and a whole range of music and entertainment related services. The first 2.500 people signed in to this service."
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