Telekom remains for a few months the largest telecommunications group in all of Romania, and this is because the sale of its fixed services division to Orange will not take place until Q2 2021 at the earliest. In the meantime, Telekom has announced its results financial results for Q1 2021, and revealed a very important change for the telecommunications market in Romania, one that probably few people expected at the moment in the country.
Telekom revealed that the number of mobile service customers decreased in 2020 to 3.643 million customers, from 4.04 million customers at the end of 2019, despite the fact that it attracted around 236.000 customers through porting. Considering that the portings covered the losses, in reality over 600.000 Telekom customers gave up their mobile phone services, and somewhere around 236.000 came from other networks to compensate for this loss.
Telekom: The totally SURPRISING announcement, NOBODY expected it
Telekom lost a very large number of customers in 2020, and this is the third, if I'm not mistaken, year in a row in which this happens for the telecommunications operator, several million customers leaving the network. The portings of these years amounted to around 700.000 customers entering the network, so that Telekom covered to some extent the reduction of the customer base, but even so, we are still talking about a serious problem.
Telekom has lost so many customers that it is now roughly equal to DIGI Mobil in terms of customer base in Romania, the operator owned by RCS & RDS reporting 3.7 million customers at the end of 2020. The differences are of course very small between the two companies , but it's interesting where Telekom went from, and where it's going, even though it has "behind" a very important German group that supports its business in Romania.
Telekom will remain an exclusive provider of mobile telecommunications services in Romania, but considering the rate at which its customers are leaving, it remains to be seen how DIGI Mobil will manage in the future.
