UPC falls further on TV in the face of tough competition from RCS&RDS and Romtelecom’s cable company

UPC, ranking second on the domestic TV services market, continued to lose subscribers in the second quarter of the year amid the rough battle for clients with rivals such as RCS&RDS and Romtelecom (NextGen), but managed to ramp up its revenues by 1% amid a rising number of users of more expensive services. UPC, the former leader of the domestic cable TV market, with almost 1.4 million clients in 2006, slid below the one million client threshold on this segment, with the total number of users on the video segment falling by 69,800 subscribers from last year. The decline comes as Q2 saw the contracts of a high number of subscribers expire, with UPC unable to retain the respective subscribers amid some unusually aggressive offers from RCS&RDS and NextGen (Romtelecom) targeting UPC clients. This was doubled by the impact of difficult economic conditions. The ending of contracts for a significant number of clients also brought UPC the first decline in recent years on expanding market segments, such as the Internet. The company also lost clients on fixed telephony. On the other hand, the company underscored it managed to boost the number of clients paying for premium services.