Romtelecom becomes no. 2 on TV market

Romtelecom has become no. 2 on the Romanian TV services market, leaving behind the Americans at UPC, after it bought the nearly 80,000 satellite TV clients of Digital Cable Systems (AKTA).

The 80,000 clients of AKTA, an operator controlled by American fund AIG, bring Romtelecom to around 1.22 million clients on the TV market, compared with UPC’s around 1.15 million. The Americans at UPC now also lost the no. 2 position on the TV market, after in the summer of 2008 they had lost to RCS the no. 1 position on cable TV. The company did not specify the value of the deal, but considering a price of 80 euros per subscriber accepted by Romtelecom at the beginning of this month when it took over another operator – Boom TV, AIG would collect 6.4 million euros.

Romtelecom, which used to hold monopoly over the landline market, returned to the TV market in November 2006 through the satellite TV platform Dolce, but the decisive step towards leaving UPC behind was the launch in 2008 of its own cable company (NextGen) and its more than 12 acquisitions in the past two years, overseen from behind the scenes by Ovidiu Ghiman, RCS&RDS’s former commercial director, currently one of the strategists of the landline operator.

Romtelecom, which is controlled by OTE (Greece) and Deutsche Telekom (Germany), however, remains significantly behind Romanian-held RCS&RDS on the TV market, with the latter having at least 3 million clients on the pay TV market, according to market estimates. RCS&RDS, held by businessman Zoltan Teszari in Oradea, is in negotiations to acquire UPC.