Cosmote România

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Cosmote România is a Romanian mobile phone operator. It has become the third mobile phone operator in the country, following Orange Romania and Vodafone Romania after surpassing Zapp Mobile. It is a GSM network and it had 1,000,000 subscribers as of December 2006 ^[1], reaching an estimated market share of around 6%.

It started operations under the brand name Cosmorom, but was rebranded as Cosmote România in 6 December 2005, after the takeover by the Greek Cosmote in August 2005.

Cosmorom was the mobile arm of Romanian national incumbent operator Romtelecom and had never reported any profit. It has been estimated that the initial investment and subsequent loss that was covered by the mother company reached over a billion dollars. Having less than 1% market share and making nothing but losses, there were talks about closing it down, but the final decision was delayed several times so far and Cosmorom's future was uncertain due to disagreement between OTE (the Greek telecoms ex-monopoly that also owns the majority stake in Romtelecom) and the Romanian government.

Nevertheless, the OTE's mobile arm Cosmote (that also owns mobile operators in Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Albania) agreed to buy the majority (70%) of shares from Romtelecom and relaunch the troubled Romanian operator under its management.

Cosmote officials believe that there is room for Cosmote România in the market of Romania where mobile penetration is at about 70% and growing fast, so they preparred for an aggressive come back at the end of 2005, with the aim of extending its poor network coverage to match rival operators and providing affordable services to gain customers.

The process of relaunching, started at the beginning of December 2005 with a wide advertising campaign, agrressive offers to attract customers, a flat tarrif pricing policy and some totally new services (like "missed call notification" and "notify me" services) both for prepaid and postpaid customers.