Orange: The crisis, roaming and interconnection fees caused our decline

Revenues of Orange, the leading operator on the Romanian mobile telephony market, fell 14.1% in the first quarter of this year, from 307 to 264 million euros - the first year-on-year revenue decline in the operator's history. The number of clients rose slightly against the first quarter of 2008, from 10.09 million to 10.11 million users, but went down 2.3% (by 237,000 clients) against the end of last year. This is the first decline in Orange's client base since the company entered the market in June 1997. Orange has not recorded this revenue level since the third quarter of 2006, when the company posted revenues worth 263 million euros and had a customer base of 7.5 million. Officials of Orange, the first telecom operator to announce its first-quarter results for 2009, are blaming the decline on several factors, among which the Romanian currency's depreciation, Romanian and European regulations and a decline in consumption, in the context of the crisis. "The revenue going down by 14.1% was generated by the 15.3% decline of the exchange rate, by the impact of fee regulations, and by the combined effects of a decline in retail prices and of consumption falling on certain segments," Thierry Millet, interim CEO of Orange Romania, told ZF. "If we only eliminated the impact of interconnection and roaming fee regulations, Orange's overall first-quarter revenues would have seen a single-digit decline, of 9.4% on a comparative basis," added the CEO.