Hints were dropped this week by senior Orange executives that it might buy UPC in Romania. The suggestions, published in Broadband TV News, citing the France Telecom CEO himself, come as UPC has suffered significant setbacks in Romania.
UPC offers some digital cable there, but mostly analog and in order to keep triple play offers at bay from the incumbent telco Romtelecom and rival cable operator RCS/RDS, it has recently signed up with Orange as a cellular provider so that it can offer Quad play services including wireless.
UPC bought leading cable operator Astral Telecom in 2005 which rocketed it to market leadership in cable, and now claims 1.3 million TV customers, of which 152,000 are digital, with 182,000 high speed Internet customers and 96,000 for VoIP services. It also has a small satellite DTH TV service as well. Local reports say that UPC has lost as many as 100,000 analog cable subscribers this year to rivals.
In the past UPC has often bought analog cable operations, moved them to digital, in the process losing subscribers, and then sold them off to private equity groups. This has happened in both Sweden and France, and resulted in quite a considerable profit for UPC, so it would happily do it again. Exactly what Orange wants with a quad play based on cable technology we’re not quite sure.