Or in Mobifon - one of the Romanian mobile carriers that is. After more or less unofficial negotiations news circulated around for a while now it appears that Vodafone officially bought 79% of the shares of Mobifon from Canadian Telesystems.

What are the implications?

First of all it will be an Orange-Vodafone competition in the Romanian market. Zapp matters just marginally both in terms of market share and in the feature/service scope it provides in spite of its official optimism and a claimed 2004 good year. As for the Cosmorom --- are they still alive? Last summer the Romtelecom (the landphone provider which used to belong to the state and which owns Cosmorom) was still looking for a strategic investor for it - not too much news on this side, and not too many hopes either. (see my last year's posts - 1, 2, 3)

Then this involves a nice exit for the early investors in the Romanian mobile carrier (Copos the actual Romanian SMEs minister without a portfolio was among them afaik). Smart investors who spotted the opportunity and jumped on it. Opportunity as big as the mall business is cooking in Bucharest these days, but I will have a different post for that. (btw, Copos is involved in this too :)) Note though that this is my hypothesis - the news specifies that the transaction was between Vodafone and TIW.

In terms of features and new services offer I don't expect that Vodafone's acquisition would have a big impact in the overall strategy of new deployments in the local market. As compared to the timing from the Central Eastern Europe or Europe of course - actually it will probably be the same delay as ever in both price adjustments and new phone releases. Unfortunately, even though Romanians seem to be quite eager in adopting new services the buying power is not permitting too much room for strategic moves here (such as a place for testing new services - the market is not here). Even though it'd be cool, Romania is far from going there, actually Romania plays rather an important role in the secondary market for mobile phones. 

What else? From a strategic point of view Vodafone is looking for growth in Europe and Central Eastern Europe is just the place for that - especially considering the high growth rate estimated for the next period in Romania (or the lower penetration rates as opposed to its Western peers).

For people interested in understanding and following the telecom market I believe Om, Ronald and EuroTelco blog are daily must reads.