Connex looking for 20% growth this year

Mobile telephony operator Connex expects to grow three or four times faster than the domestic economy this year.
“Connex will be looking for considerable growth in 2004 over 2003, about 15% to 20% increases,” President and Chief Operating Officer Ted Lattimore told Ziarul Financiar.
The operator is also planning to exceed the 4 million-customer milestone “well before the year end”, because “we finished 2003 with more customers than we anticipated,” Lattimore adds.
In fact, Canadian telecom Telesystem International Wireless (TIW), the majority shareholder of MobiFon, owner of the Connex brand, at the end of last week announced Connex had reached 3.457,000 clients by December 31, 2003, growing by 495,000 net new clients in the fourth quarter of 2003.
Postpaid net additions reached 38.8% of the total net additions during the quarter, resulting in a 63/37 prepaid/postpaid mix at the end of December.
The company did not provide any financials for 2003 yet, as TIW will not release them until the end of January to beginning of February, as the officials in Romania say. Lattimore gave a hint of what the revenues in 2003 might look like, saying, “Connex now has contracted more than $30,000,000 in revenue for services beyond GSM.”
Following the deregulation of the telecom market on January 1, 2003, the company launched its integrated service strategy, by providing its business clients with the possibility to choose a single provider of communications services, both fixed and mobile and data. “This strategy proved to be incredibly successful in the second half of the year,” Ted Lattimore said.
Connex is interested in a 3G UMTS licence. If the Communications Ministry provides the licensing this year, the deployment will most likely be completed in 2005.
The company did not specify how much it invested last year, but Ted Lattimore believes major investments will be directed to expanding the network in Transilvania and Banat. Further investment will go to the completion of the new head office in Piata Charles de Gaulle (Charles de Gaulle Square) in Bucharest, a new customer service centre and a new technical centre.
The operator was totalling 2,635,000 customers at the end of 2002. Simple calculations show MobiFon’s customer base rose by 31.19% and 822,000 users respectively in 2003. The data provided by the company show that approximately 60% of the net additions were attracted in the fourth quarter of 2003.
MobiFon’s archrival in Romania, Orange, announced it had reached 3.3 million clients by December 31, 2003 a few days ago.
iuliana.susanu@zf.ro