Cosmote Romania

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Cosmote Romania

Type	subsidiary of Cosmote
Founded	2000 as Cosmorom
Headquarters	Bucharest, Romania
Key people	Nikolaos Tsolas, CEO
Industry	Mobile telecommunications
Website	www.cosmote.ro

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 reached 3.000.000 subscribers in October 2007 with an estimated market share of around 10%.^[1]

It started operations under the brand name Cosmorom, but was re branded 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 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, 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, aggressive commercial offers to attract customers, a flat tariff pricing policy and some totally new services (like "missed call notification" and "notify me" services) both for prepaid and postpaid customers. A strong accent was given to the prepaid market, including a very aggressive campaign offering a limited number of cards with 2000 free minutes within the network per month.

It is the only operator in Romania without a 3G operation license, and, since all the licenses have already been auctioned, is not expected to obtain one before 2011. Therefore, it is the only mobile operator in Romania that does not offer high speed Internet access.