Page 27 - BNE_magazine_06_2019

bne June 2019 Companies & Markets I 27
Falling smartphone sales drag down home electronics sector in Romania
Iulian Ernst in Bucharest
Sales of home electronics in Romania declined by 1.7% in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period of 2018, to around €700mn, shows an analysis by GfK.
Notably, the smartphone sales plunged to a quarter of those recorded in Q1 last year, in value terms. This sub- segment prompted the negative evolution of the whole telecom equipment segment, losing more than 74% of its value compared to the same quarter of 2018, with sales of only €53mn.
On the other hand, the phablets category – devices with a display size of more than 5.6 inches that straddle the smartphone and tablet categories – still enjoys “crazy growing rates” of 146.5%, to reach €231mn sales in Q1,
GfK commented, which shows that Romanian consumers have moved to wider-screen mobile devices.
The overall market decline was mainly prompted by the weaker sales of telecom equipment (43% of the total market) and IT equipment (14% of the market). The telecom equipment segment shrank by 4.5% year-on-year, to €301mn. It includes mobile and smartphones, phablets, headphones and core wearables, such as smart clocks and Fitbits.
Against the overall decline, sales of major domestic appliances (18.3% of the total market in the period) increased by 11.2% year-on-year. Sales of small household appliances (7.4% of total) also increased, by 3.9% year-on-year. All the other segments contracted.
One year after ban, Telegram still accessible from Russia with growing audience
EWDN in Moscow
One year after Russian authorities decided to block it, the instant messenger Telegram continues to be widely acces- sible from Russia, reports East-West Digital News (EWDN).
Almost half of Telegram users in Russia do need to use VPNs to access the service, according to Telegram Analytics; but the num- ber of daily users of the service in Russia grew from 3.7mn in April 2018 to 4.4mn in February 2019, according to Mediascope data.
Thus, despite the ban, Telegram continues to rank third in Russia after WhatsApp and Viber.
Telegram was banned in Russia on April 13, 2018, following its refusal to let the Russian secret service FSB to decipher user messengers as required by law.
Adopted in 2016, a new Russian legislation (dubbed ‘Yarovaya law’ or ‘Big Brother law’) requires messenger apps and other “organizers of information distribution” to add additional coding to transmitted electronic messages so that the Federal Security Service (FSB) can decipher them.
Telegram agreed to register its service in Russia, but refused to cooperate with the secret service under “laws incompatible with Telegram’s privacy policy.” As a consequence, a Moscow court ruled to block access to Telegram in a trial, which the mes- senger’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov called “an open farce.”
The authorities’ failed attempts to block access to the service in Russia caused substantial damages to a number of online services, which saw their IP address blocked even though they had no relation to Telegram.
According to Pavel Chikov of human rights watchdog Agora, Tele- gram’s resistance was helped by international cloud service provid- ers such as Amazon and Digital Ocean, which refused to block the service as requested by the Russian authorities. Meanwhile, the Telegram app could still be downloaded from Apple’s app store.
In early 2019, Pavel Durov shut down the legal entity Telegram Mes- senger LLP, which was on the official Russian ban list, in an attempt to lift the ban. However, Roskomnadzor Head Alexander Zharov stated that such formal changes would “not change anything.”
www.bne.eu