Post Office gets eight bids for fixed telephony project

Although RomTelecom is complaining about its finances, the telecoms market is coveted by numerous players: the Romanian Post Office has eight potential partners to choose from, in order to materialise its fixed telephony plans. To be considered, the bidders must be able and willing to spend somewhere around two and six million dollars, for starters.
The Romanian Commercial Bank (BCR), Electromagnetica, Romservice International, Logic Telecom, the Romanian Industrial Group, SkyTel and the Financial Investment Companies (SIF) Banat-Crisana and Oltenia. What do they have in common? They want to branch out into telecommunications. They have all submitted bids to set up a new telephony operator, together with the National Romanian Post Office Company (CNPR). According to CNPR head Gabriel Mateescu, the Post Office aims to establish a new company, mainly held by the State. The infrastructure of the new operator will take several hundred million dollars to build, over the next three to five years.
“The evaluation commission will meet at the beginning of February, when we can learn about their bids. By the end of next month, we will know the names of our partners for the telephony operator project,” Marian Banica, head of the CNPR Networks-Telecommunications Division told Ziarul Financiar.
The SIF officials have displayed more restraint. “Everybody is merely voicing intentions, for now. We cannot submit a bid, mainly because we only know what has been in the press so far,” said Teodor Ciurezu, SIF Oltenia economic manager. Daniel Manate, the strategy director of SIF Banat Crisana, showed the same reserve.
As the Post Office head Gabriel Mateescu had told Ziarul Financiar in the past week, the National Romanian Post Office Company is planning to enter the fixed telephony market, most likely in Q2, 2003, mainly aiming at international telephony services, only to expand to national telephony and Internet services at a later time. In the first stage, the company will cover Bucharest and other nine cities, with Brasov and Iasi amongst them.
The new telephony operator will have a mixed infrastructure: part of it will be built by the company, which will also rent the network of another operator for certain areas.