Optimus Telecomunicações, S.A.
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Optimus Telecomunicações , S.A. is a portuguese GSM / UMTS mobile operator created at the end of 1997 that entered the Portuguese market on September 15 1998 to compete with the two already existing operators.
Optimus belongs to the enterprise group Sonae and France Télécom / Orange SA, and started operating in Portugal after an intense and successful advertising campaign. One of the forms found by the company to bring in customers was the creation of a modality called Pioneiros (Pioneers), where customers could make a daily pay-registration without any cost right before operation started. Then, operation started with a daring marketing campaign where customers would pay only 5$00 per minute to other 0933 customers (the operator prefix). Optmus adopted the concept of pre-paid cards, already a success with its compeitors, by creating the Boomerang tariff plan.
The Pioneering marketing campaign was recognized internationally. In early 1999, Optimus won the GSM Marketing Success award of the GSM Association in Cannes, in France, having become the first Portuguese operator to achieve such result in a World-wide Congress of GSM. This event is organized annually by the GSM Association, an organization with a membership of more than 380 operators of mobile communications from about 150 countries. GSM Awards are delivered in every edition of the congress and are considered the most important of the sector. This was the first of many awards won by Optimus in subsequent years.
The very aggressive strategy used by Optimus to enter the Portuguese mobile telecommunications market paid off, because it attracted 700,000 customers in only one year of operation (by October 1999). In September 1999, Optimus parent company, Sonae Telecom, launched Novis, a fixed line operator. In January 2000, Optimus returned to Cannes to collect another GSM award for the best inovation in GSM for its Taxi Digital project to use digital technology (and the Optimus network) in the transmission and processing of data between taxi central offices and their drivers.
In 2000 the company's prefix was changed to 93. In June of the year Optimus reached the millionth customer, approximately 80 percent which were buying pre-paid cards.
In December of 2000, Optimus was one of the winning companies of the competition of attribution of UMTS licences (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), that allows, through 3G handhelds, to transmit images and to accede to the Internet and other services, such as if was a computer.
In the Summer of 2003, Optimus lauched a multimedia portal service, called Optimus Zone.
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