France Telecom VP: Orange will buy shops

Orange Romania, the largest mobile telephone operator, intends to sell its products and services through mobile shops in the remote and rural areas of Romania and will significantly increase the number of its own shops, as part of an aggressive expansion plan that targets the diversification of methods used to aggressively tap into market.
“You’ll witness a significant expansion of Orange’s own shops, as part of the strategy that will introduce several ways to access the market, which was approved today,” Olaf Swantee, executive vice-president of France Telecom, in charge of the group’s mobile telephony services since last August, told ZF.
He was in Bucharest last week and assessed Orange’s business in Romania together with the operator’s managers and also met the company’s important customers.
Swantee specified that the expansion of distribution channels would also be achieved through partnerships. “We’ll quickly build a number of our own shops, but we will also invite our partners to work with us. We’ll also have mobile shops in more remote areas and we’re considering a system of franchises, as well as the shop-in-shop concept,” he said. “We’re pursuing both organic growth and acquisitions. We’re considering all possible alternatives,” said Swantee when asked whether Orange was considering the acquisition of some domestic retailers.
Orange’s plan seems to be a reaction to consolidation on the domestic GSM retail market and to the threat from its biggest rival, Vodafone, which this year bought two retailers that were formerly exclusive Orange partners. Proton and Vegastel together had a network of around 120 shops that sold Orange products.
The quality of network services and customer relationships will have an ever-greater role in maintaining the customer base and luring new customers, as the domestic mobile telephony market matures, Olaf Swantee says.
“(…) We’ve approved a new annual investment worth 200 million euros in the network, to be used both for network expansion and to improve services in key areas, such as Bucharest,” added Swantee.
“We’ll continue to invest a significant percentage of our revenues in this country in the following years, in order to improve services and network quality”.