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Romania Telecommunications Report Q3 2011
Business Monitor International, June 2011, Pages: 104
The Romania Telecommunications Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, telecommunication associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Romania's telecommunications industry.
BMI’s Q311 update of the Romania Telecommunications Report contains analysis of the market data from the major fixed telephony, broadband and mobile service providers up to Q111. It also contains data released by the regulator, as well as updated forecasts for the mobile, fixed telephony and broadband markets sectors through to 2015. The Q311 report is also the first quarterly to contain BMI’s ARPU forecasts for operators and the wider market through to 2015.
Incumbent Romtelecom continues to report fixed-line losses in Q111, down 5.3% y-o-y as fixed-to-mobile substitution has continued. The incumbent and alternative operators are also under pressure from cable TV operators and VoIP service providers alike. BMI forecasts the fixed-line market to decline progressively from 2010, falling to 4.125mn lines by 2015.
The Romanian mobile market experienced its largest ever fall in subscribers in Q111, with a net loss of 1.132mn subscriptions. The subscriber losses in Q111 followed net losses of subscribers from Q210 to Q111, although earlier quarters registered much smaller losses. It is also notable that Q111 was the first quarter in which all four operators reported subscriber losses. Vodafone reported the single largest subscriber losses of 607,000, as it continued to discount inactive SIMs. However, as all operators reported negative growth, we believe the wider macroeconomic conditions continued to have an impact alongside SIM discounting.
BMI had long held the view that the operators’ reported results were built on a large number of inactive subscribers, so the process of deactivation helps provide a clearer picture of actual growth prospects as well as yielding ARPU figures that more closely reflect reality. Nevertheless, ARPUs are low and are still deteriorating as subscribers remain reluctant to access premium value-added services. Greater efforts are therefore needed to retain customers and persuade them to consume more data. Our forecasts have been raised slightly after being reined in last quarter; BMI now believes there will be 30.58mn mobile subscribers by 2015. By then, there will be 9.9mn 3G subscribers, accounting for 32% of the market.
The fixed segment has been boosted by continued deployment of xDSL and by cable operators upgrading their networks in 2010. However, the number of mobile broadband subscribers passed that of fixed-line broadband connections during 2010, and BMI believes that there were 6.701mn subscribers in total at the end of 2010, a penetration rate of 31.2%. Despite registering growth, consolidation in the cable sector is resulting in the loss of some cable broadband subscribers, while IPTV and over-the-top (OTT) video services are stealing customers away from smaller players. Mobile broadband is now the primary growth engine in the broadband sector, but we believe this segment will lose impetus before the end of our forecast period as operators will find it increasingly difficult to migrate subscribers to the more costly platforms and as they encounter difficulties in extending services into rural and underserved areas.
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