Mobile telephony operator Orange Romania overshot the 7 million-customer mark in the first half of this year.
Orange Romania posted 504 million-euro turnover for the first half of 2005, an increase of 24.3% compared with the same time last year, when turnover stood at 406 million euros, the company officials say.
"This increase in revenues is due to the significant increase in the number of customers and especially of the post-paid subscribers, as well as to the development of the value added services," Richard Moat, Orange Romania CEO told ZIARUL FINANCIAR.
Orange Romania is the largest domestic mobile telephony operator in terms of number of clients, totalling over 7.2 million customers at the end of last month, an increase of 26% from the 5.72 million in the same time of last year. Its main competitor, Vodafone Romania, reported 6.73 million customers at the end of June, up 351,248 from the first three months of this year. Vodafone's number of 3G users went up by more than 36,000 to 171,237 in the second quarter of this year. Orange launched 3G services in Romania in June, with the first cities covered being Bucharest and Timisoara. Brasov and Cluj were added in July.
As part of its expansion strategy, Orange has recently added a number of national and international TV stations to its Orange World portal, complementing the offer and launched the Music Store service that lets customers buy songs they choose from 230,000 offered.
On the other hand, Orange Romania announced growth on the segment of messages exchanged between customers. The number of MMS-es sent was 175% higher in the first half of the year compared with the corresponding period of last year, while the number of SMS-es sent rose by 36%.
As for the French Orange group, it reported 25.8 billion-euro revenues in the first six months of 2006, an increase of 9.3% from the 23.6 billion euros in the first half of 2005.
Net income Group share fell from 3.36 billion euros last year to 2.35 billion euros in the first half of this year. Operating income stood at 5.3 billion euros in the period considered, also down from the first half of 2005, when it reached 6.4 billion euros.
Orange reported organic cash flow of 3.3 billion euros in the first six months of 2006, and expects it to reach 7 billion euros in 2006, its officials say.
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