The top executives of the major telecommunications companies in Croatia -- Hrvatski Telekom (HT), Vipnet, Tele2 Hrvatska and Optima Telekom (OT) -- have said in their statements for Hina that sensible changes by regulators, legislature and tax administration as well as subsidies for investments would help telecommunications companies to focus on investments, developing services and employment.
Companies in this field undertook stronger steps toward restructuring and transformation with the aim of stabilising and consolidating their business. Some larger companies even managed to buy out smaller companies and strengthened their portfolios particularly with IT and TV offers. The largest companies - HT and Vipnet - both fired old and employed new employees, invested in data centres, developed services and technology but all companies have one thing in common: to cut costs at all levels and to retain the number of users.
According to the national telecommunications regulator, HAKOM, at the end of September there were 4.66 million users of mobile telephone services which is a slight rise of about 60,000 compared to the same period last year. Around 2.3 million were with HT and around 1.8 million with Vipnet, and the remainder used Tele2 services.
There were around 1.36 million subscribers to landline services which is about 10,000 less than last year. Again most users subscribed, around 1.2 million were with HT.
Around 1.4 million users had broadband access to the Internet, of which 435,000 used mobile Internet services which is around 10,000 less than last year but at the same time the number of landline broadband users grew by nearly the same number to 944,000.
Traffic in text messages continued to fall, recording a reduction of around 8.6% or 2.4 billion text messages.