Telecom market drop slows down in Romania this year

The revenues on the telecom segment in Romania continued to drop this year, but to a lower extent than in 2009, according to Catalin Marinescu, president of the National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications (ANCOM). Last year, the market reached EUR 3.9 billion, down 15 percent on 2008. “The effects of the world economic crisis become more obvious in the local telecom. The number of subscribers for mobile and landline telephony have decreased, the traffic continues to grow but at lower rates than in previous years. The Internet services segment however went up considerably,” said Marinescu, quoted by Agerpres. Marinescu expects growth on the voice traffic and text messaging segments, as operators have included more free minutes and texts in their offers, although the number of users will actually drop. The broadband Internet segment will also continue to grow. Romania has 5.7 million users of audiovisual transmission services, but the number was down 1.5 percent in the first quarter of the year. The cable TV penetration rate in Romania also went down, to 78.3 percent, from 79.4 percent at the end of last year. Landline telephony slide by 1 percent, to 4.6 million lines at the end of June this year. On the mobile segment, the number of users reached 24.4 million, which includes subscriptions and active prepaid cards. Romania's population is of only 21.6 million, which means mobile telephony users in Romania already hold more than one active mobile telephone number. However, the mobile telephony penetration decreased by 4.7 percentage points compared to December 2009, to 113.5 percent. On the fixed Internet access, Romania has 2.9 million connections, up on December 2009. The mobile Internet side registered 5.7 million connections in the first half of the year. editor@romania-insider.com