In 1930, Societatea Anonimă Română de Telefoane was founded, more than 90% of its value being a foreign investment from ITT. During this period, SART commissioned Palatul Telefoanelor, a historic building in Bucharest. Although the building has suffered from several earthquakes and a bombardment, it is still standing, and has recently undergone a process of reconstruction and reconsolidation. In 1949, SART was nationalised and turned into a division of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. The slow pace of technological development that ensued was in accordance with a more general trend in the country during the Communist period, which lasted until 1989. In December 1989, ROM-POST-TELECOM was created as a post and telecommunications operator, independent of the Ministry. The company adopted the name of Romtelecom after a reorganization in July 1991, when the state-owned company was also given the monopoly for basic telecommunications services. In 1997, a 35% of the company's shares were sold to the Greek telecommunications company OTE. A corruption case arose around details of this privatisation, but eventually no measures were taken. OTE has since acquired an additional 18% of the shares and has thus become the majority shareholder of the company.
Mobile communications
The company launched on the Romanian mobile telephony market in 1998 as Cosmorom. In the first years, the company failed to gain market share. Having less around 1% market share and financial losses, there were talks about the selling of the company, but the decision was delayed several times due to disagreement between OTE, the majority owner of Romtelecom and the Romanian Government. In January 2004, Romtelecom decided to sell a majority stake in the company. Two of the purchase offers received were from Mobikom and Deutsche Telekom's Matev from Hungary. In July 2005, OTE's mobile division Cosmote decided to buy 70% of shares in Cosmorom from Romtelecom, and on 6 December 2005, it was rebranded as Cosmote România. By the end of 2005, Cosmote had approximately 50,000 subscribers, while Orange and Vodafone each had 6 million subscribers. On 2 March 2006, the company started a strong sales campaign on the prepaid market, which led to sharp subscriber rise to 1.23 million subscribers by the end of the year, and finally reaching a peak of 6.92 million subscribers by 2009. On 30 June 2009, Cosmote acquired Zapp Mobile, a CDMA mobile operator with 374,000 subscribers, which also had a 3G license. Following Zapp acquisition, Cosmote launched its 3G service.
Telekom Romania: unified services
On 12 September 2014, Romtelecom and Cosmote România unified its mobile and fixed services under the Deutsche Telekom branding and changed their respective legal names to Telekom Romania Communications S.A. and Telekom Romania Mobile Communications S.A. respectively.
Recent history
Due to fall in subscriber numbers, the company has tried to attract customers with various offers, including by bundling mobile and fixed services, but its market share has continued to drop. The company raised prices, but financial losses continued.
