The campaign also benefitted enormously by parent Sonae owning the Continente chain of hypermarkets, thus reaching mass-market at a cost-effective rate.

Optimus adopted the concept of pre-paid cards, which had been invented in Portugal[2] and was already a success with its competitors, by creating the Boomerang tariff plan.

The very aggressive strategy used by Optimus to enter the Portuguese mobile telecommunications market paid off, attracting 700,000 customers in only one year of operation (by October 1999).

In September 1999, Optimus parent Sonaecom launched Novis, a fixed-line operator, and Clix, an Internet service provider and web portal.

In December 2000, Optimus won the bid for one of the four licenses for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System).

Handsets using this third-generation (3G) mobile technology can relay images and video and access the Internet at quasi-broadband speeds.

In 2004, France Télécom became the major shareholder, with the holding company Atlas Services Belgium (ASB) as the largest minority owner.

In June 2005, Optimus launched a wireless Internet access service over GPRS and 3G, with downlink speeds of up to 386 kbit/s, under the brand Kanguru.

Interestingly, Optimus and its competitors were constantly changing their tariff's conditions (prices to other intra-network voice calls are dropping, a 1500 SMS bonus for the same network is being given, the usage of the monthly fee is changing) similar to a sort of battle being held by the three Portuguese mobile communications service providers.