Yorgos IOANNIDIS, CEO Romtelecom, outlined the new strategy of Romtelecom at the Communications Day, May 10, 2007
"The future, both for the consumer and the companies, is broadband.
Romtelecom: Romtelecom is changing together with Romania. Romtelecom is changing for the last 7 years day after day, month after month.
As of 1999 Romtelecom has invested over 1.5 billion euro and in the last year only 200 million euro.
We are planning to invest more than half a billion for the next generation network we are building. These investments guarantee higher quality services and in the long term, of course, much more competitive prices.
Last year Romtelecom was focused on network modernisation and restructuring. A huge company of 50.000 people today operates with 12.000 people and we think that we still have to do a lot of work for these people to work coordinated and coherently. And we are working now on this, in order to be able to satisfy customers and to be able to give better services to our customers. Out target today is how we shall offer most competitive and better services to our customers.
In order to offer these services we are building the digital highways.
A month ago we have agreed with our major suppliers to build the most robust core IP network of the Central and Eastern European part of the world.
Today Romtelecom has started to implement the project of introducing 14 large scale routers which are called CRS. In the whole region there are only 3, we are installing 14.
We believe that this will be the core of the digital highway on which all the access, content which will need to communicate from place to place, will have to go through.
This is not enough. It is not enough to build the access, because it is quite obvious that if you do not have content
Romtelecom has entered into the content era mainly through the digital satellite TV offering. This satellite TV has an enormous acceptance by the Romanian market. And in 5 months we have achieved 200.000 customers, aiming to reach over 400.000 by the end of the year.
And that is not all in the content arena. Because you all know the "MTV ON Demand" offering of Romtelecom and you also know the GetLoaded offering which we launched a few days ago. And all this we believe will give the assurance to our customers that Romtelecom today is no longer what it used to be.
Romtelecom for years was just a company of fixed line telephony. Fixed line telephony for people to talk and that was all. Today that is changing and will be changing day after day more and fixed line telephony will reach to other type of communication and we will provide the customer the flexibility to use it the way they want it and we shall see that in the weeks to come.
Internet and content - you have already same taste of it how this is offered by Romtelecom.
We have a team that provides state of the art solutions for companies - through our IP VPNs, MPLS and I am sure moreand more we shall be concentrating on this field.
Finally, with our colleagues at Cosmote we will be working together and we are working together to come up with more integrated products.
What comes next... You may expect that I will tell you about great technologies.
What I will tell you is what makes the difference, in my understanding, is not the technology.
I will be more provocative and I will say: could it be only pricing?
I know the issues of pricing, I know how the market feels about Romtelecom prices, but I will still say that it is not either pricing alone. It is actually value for money. And who adds value for the money? It is the people. Romtelecom today has one strategic goal: to concentrate on the people. People in the company and people outside the company."
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