Cosmote enters the business segment

"We have invested in the sales work force, and had an 80 percent success rate in contracting clients who were using mobile phone services with free minutes from other operators", said Adrian Florea. "The market is beginning to open up,” added Florea.

Some 15 percent of Cosmote customers have a subscription and 80 percent of these have “entry” subscriptions with 15 or 30 free minutes. Some 20 percent are legal entities. According to Business Standard calculations, Cosmote Romania has 360,000 subscriptions contracted by individuals and 90,000 subscriptions contracted by legal entities.

The latest National Regulatory Authority for Communications and Information Technology (ANRCTI) report on the telecom market for the first six months of 2007, of 6.5 million subscriptions 2.2 mln are used by 500,000 legal entities. This is an average of 4.6 SIM cards per contract.

Cosmote’s revenues reached €41.5 mln in the third quarter of 2007, translating to 232 percent growth compared to the same period last year. Cosmote has over 3 million users and a market share of 13 percent. The Romanian mobile phone market is dominated by Orange and Vodafone, while Zapp has had the same number of customers for over a year, at 500,000.