Orange, the biggest mobile telephony company in Romania, believes the local satellite TV market (DTH) is closed to new players, and has scrapped its plans to launch a new DTH platform, after it took into account both the boom of the domestic market and the fact that RCS&RDS and Romtelecom have come to account for almost 90% of the almost 2 million TV satellite clients.
"Our entry on the satellite TV services market would be a very difficult step to take at the moment. The market has already grown a great deal, so one can assume that there is very little room for new subscribers in this department. This is a market that is more or less close to maturity," Julien Ducarroz, 32, Orange's new strategy director told ZF. He explained that, theoretically, Orange could have contemplated the acquisition of a DTH operator in Romania, although the structure of the market would have needed to be different for this to actually happen.
"Even if a decision were made to look at the market, we would notice that the main player is DigiTV (held by RCS&RDS), and under the circumstances, we would need to buy a player in a similar position. However, there is no obvious candidate on the market for this (takeover i.e.)," the Orange official said. In 2007, the number of clients for DTH services went up by 177%, after RCS&RDS and Romtelecom attracted the majority of clients on the market, because of their aggressive pricing strategy. Other players on the market include UPC Romania (Focus Sat), DCS Romania (Max TV) and DTH Television Group (Boom TV), but each of the three players is far behind the market leaders, with less than 200,000 clients. DigiTV (RCS&RDS) has 1 million customers and Romtelecom (Dolce) half a million.
Swiss born Julien Ducarroz believes other factors that make it hard for Orange to enter the DTH business are the market's low rates and the "huge" supply of
