The Romanian telecommunications and postal services market reached EUR 4.4 billion at the end of 2009, according to data from the National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications, based on the annual financial statements submitted by the operators. This was down 12.5 percent compared to 2008, when the market was of EUR 5 billion.

The electronic communications market was worth EUR 4 billion, while the postal services market totaled EUR 414 million.

However, certain areas still posted growth. The number of broadband Internet access connections was up 12 percent in December 2009, reaching 2.8 million fixed connections. The number of mobile broadband Internet access connections reached 2.5 million, up 66 percent compared to end-2008.

“It is difficult to draw up an exact picture of the Romanian telecom sector in 2009, the first year to witness the effects of the worldwide crisis. What we may say for certain is that 2009 was the first year when many providers of electronic communications services or networks preferred to report their turnovers, and renounced at auditing their revenues in order to submit to the Authority only the revenues achieved from communications services or networks,” Catalin Marinescu, the President of ANCOM, has said.

The first five operators which provide electronic communications networks or services registered a turnover of around EUR 3.5 billion in 2009, covering 87 percent of the total value of this market. In total, 2,036 providers of electronic communications services and of postal services reported their financial data to ANCOM.

The authority decided to stop charging the monitoring tariff owed by operators for 2010, so that companies could focus on investing in network roll-out and in innovation.

romania-insider.com