Orange: We are counting on 8.7m clients at the end of the year

Orange Romania, the number one on the local mobile telephony market, estimates it will manage to attract 700,000 clients this year, despite an extremely competitive market. The scheduled investments will surpass 220 million dollars, a big chunk of which will go to expanding the coverage for 3G services. “I would say we can definitely reach 8.7 million clients by the end of the year. It was obvious that this year’s growth rate would slow down, that the market couldn’t have kept up the growth pace of 2006,” Richard Moat (photo), CEO of Orange Romania told ZF. Last year was a record year for the local GSM mobile telephony industry – with the number of SIM cards sold (new users) standing at some 3.6 million. Orange Romania reported an increase in the number of its clients by one million people, therefore increasing the figure from seven to eight million. Vodafone, its main competitor, saw a surge in the number of clients by approximately 1.6 million people in 2006, reaching 7.717 million. Cosmote, which relaunched its operations in December 2005, attracted about one million users.