The former head of Orange Denmark, British-born Richard Moat, has been appointed chief executive officer of the Romanian telephony operator following a meeting of Orange Romania’s Board of Directors.
Richard Moat thus replaces Bernard Moscheni, who will run Orange’s Belgium arm, Mobistar. Moat was at the helm of Orange’s Danish branch, sold to TeliaSonera early in July 2004 for 600 million euros. He was also chief executive officer of TA Orange, the operator’s branch in Thailand, between 2000-2002.
Having been with Orange since 1992, Richard Moat has managed to boost the revenues of the regional operators he ran. The Thai branch successfully accumulated more than one million customers in only 12 months from its launch and become a profitable business. By the end of 2002, when the Brit was packing his bags to leave for Denmark, TA Orange had managed to develop its network and cover 90% of the entire country.
The branch in Denmark (which sees five operators clashing over a market of 5.5 million people) ranked third after TDC and Sonofon at the end of 2003, with an estimated market share of 12% and average revenue per user (ARPU) of 373 euros a year. Orange Denmark logged EBITDA of 8.6 million euros for the first quarter of 2004. Analysts say the deal signals the saturation of the northern mobile telephony market and is part of France Telecom’s strategy to exit from those markets where its mobile telephony arm’s market share stands at less than 20%, as explained in the online publication The Feature, held by Nokia.
Bernard Moscheni, who has run Orange Romania for the last four years, will replace Bernard Ghillebaert at the helm of Mobistar Belgium. The latter was promoted to a better position within Orange, following the Belgian operator’s very good results, securing him a key spot within the management team in London. Mobistar is one of the few Western operators that have increased not only revenues and profit, but also the number of clients and even the ARPU last year.
dan.dragomir@zf.ro