Is Astral looking for exit? Or is Romania an attractive place for expansion? Or perhaps both - either way it looks like a win-win situation as Romania is a fairly big market and whoever buys will not have been able to start form scratch otherwise (more expensive). And Astral has built an infrastructure worth almost 25% of the market. It remains to be seen if the EUR 230 mil is the right price (3.5 x revenues in a 300 mil market). Except for UPC (which played a lower profile as compared to RDS), the interested parties are institutional investors.
I think that one of the two dominant mobile operators around (Connex or Orange) should give it a shot and try to get a strategic position here, even though it may imply a bit of a financial stretch. But a la long it may pay off as nowadays the telecom industry is facing a continuing death spiral. Besides, my guess is that data transmission and internet services are going to be one of the booming segment in the next 3-4 years in Romania. The reason is fairly simple - in Romania the internet is the most underdeveloped driver in the triple play convergence: voice, TV and internet. And paradoxically - the most disruptive.
The unwillingness of households to pay for added value services is likely to delay investment in residential areas infrastructure, while companies traditionally have more "conservative" (rational) spending patterns. Consider the fact that I pay 15 EURO/month for all the bandwidth I need, but I don't spend any other money online or for online-related services, not to my provider or to any other content provider, and I'm one of the most internet savvy users I know. For 15 EURO/month including VAT, an investor wouldn't recuperate the cost of the switch any time soon. Regarding services, if we ignore VoIP, 99% of traffic is constituted by P2P illegal file sharing, browsing, traditional file transfer, CounterStrike and occasional *free* streaming media. Even small companies are rolling their own teleconference solutions, when needed, so I really don't see a market for services, even though everyone is just salivating over them.
The big assumption here is that there is no demand side. I think that this doesn't stand and here is why:
1) the retail demand side for services over the internet was artificially kept low as the third-party infrastructure was not developed (i.e. online payment solutions). As such online shopping in Romania averages ridiculously low figures. Even people interested from buying from abroad seem to have such technical problems. I think that the solution to this is just a matter of when and not of if - there are already two e-payments solutions launched in the market, expensive, true, but that it will be until competition will take off. It is not "unwillingness" whatsoever, perhaps unawareness is better word.
2) the corporate demand will go up similarly not only for the Voip solutions but also for also taking advantage of decreased information assymetries that the internet is providing. This can materialize through access to competitive intelligence, improved productivity, better communication, etc. You do have a point with the traditional pattern spending, but it is again just a matter of realinzing the competitive advantages they can get from using internet, and I believe Romanians are quick adopters of such practices. Key here is promoting success stories and I have started to see such stories already.
3) the supply side is going to push a multitude of services as they need to recover the massive investments in the newly emerging technologies. This means that they i)will disrupt their own offer services (see RDS - Astral recent bandwidth/price war) and ii) invest in educating the demand side, as they need scale. And this will reflect in the demand side in the #1 and #2 context.