January 8 (SeeNews) - Romania's competition authority said on Tuesday that it has fined Orange Romania, a unit of France Telecom's Internet and mobile arm Orange, with 65 million lei ($16 million/ 14 million euro) for abuse of dominant position.
The Competition Council has found that during the period 2011-2015, Orange Romania has limited the access of Simplus Invest to its mobile phone network, blocking transmission of commercial messages to and from Orange customers, the anti-trust authority said in a press release.
Simplus Invest intermediates the transmission of commercial messages through short numbers between certain recipient companies and mobile customers. In order to operate, it concludes contracts with companies that want to send commercial messages as well as with all mobile operators, which allocate the short numbers.
"Access to the Orange network is indispensable for integrators to market their own products, as Orange has the largest number of users on the mobile telephony market and beneficiaries want to have access to all these users," the Competition Council said.
The competition authority fined Orange Romania with 148 million lei in 2011 also for abuse of dominant position.
Orange Romania's revenues rose 3.5% on the year to 287 million euro ($329 million) in the third quarter, driven by higher adoption of fixed-mobile converged services and increased mobile data consumption.
Its customer base totalled 10.9 million at the end of September, 1.8% higher year-on-year.
(1 euro=4.6670 lei)
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