French telecommunications group Orange reached 10.51 million customers in Romania, in the third quarter of 2014, adding 79,000 more clients compared to the end of last year, according to the group’s quarterly report.

This is the highest number of clients for Orange Romania since the first quarter of 2010, when the company had some 10.8 million clients. The most it had was in the fourth quarter of 2009 when it got very close to 11 million clients, the group’s data shows.

Orange doesn’t specify how many of these clients had subscriptions and how many of them used pre-paid cards. There is also no mention of how many mobile broadband customers the company has in Romania, although Orange used to publish this information up until three years ago. In the last quarter of 2011, Orange had more than 3 million mobile broadband customers.

Orange Romania had a turnover of EUR 227 million in the third quarter of 2014, 5.8% lower compared to the same period of 2013, but this was due to the regulator’s decision to cut termination tariffs. Excluding the impact of this cut, the revenues went up by 3.4%, the company announced.

In the first nine months of this year, the company recorded a turnover of EUR 676 million.

Orange’s sales of 3G and 4G tablets tripled in the third quarter of this year compared to the same period of 2013, as more clients are accessing the company’s highs-speed internet services. Sales of 4G smartphones reached 40% of the total smartphone sales in Orange’s network, more than triple compared to last year.

Mobile internet traffic via Orange increased more than 70% in the third quarter and smartphone internet traffic doubled.

Orange is currently the largest mobile communications operator in Romania. Its main competitors are Vodafone and Telekom Romania, which is part of Deutsche Telekom group.

Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com