MARCH 10 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Almaty ruled in favour of Kazakhstan’s anti-monopoly commission by upholding an $88m fine against Kcell, majority owned by Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera, for abusing its dominant market position. Kcell introduced an SMS system to alert customers of missed calls. The anti-monopoly commission said this was unfair.
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(News report from Issue No. 175, published on March 12 2014)
MARCH 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Beeline Uzbekistan, Vimpelcom’s subsidiary, saw its revenue grow by 11% in 2013 to $175m, it said during its annual results presentation.
The company also boosted its customer numbers by 3% in 2013 to 10.5m partly because MTS’s subsidiary, Uzdunrobita, had been chased out of Uzbekistan in 2012. This is a smaller jump than you may have imagined but most of the switch over of customers from Uzdunrobita to Beeline happened in Q4 2012.
Most importantly from the presentation was the statistic that data usage rose significantly in Uzbekistan last year.
Beeline reported a 61% jump in mobile data revenue. This is mainly internet surfing on mobile phones. What this means is that the Uzbek mobile consumer is becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Beeline is one of two mobile providers in Uzbekistan. Ucell, owned by Swedish-Finnish mobile operator TeliaSonera, has a similar number of customers.
Both Beeline and Ucell will have watched the MTS saga apprehensively. For now, though, Uzbekistan is a good market.
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(News report from Issue No. 175, published on March 12 2014)
FEB. 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Financial police in Georgia opened a tax investigation into Geocell, its largest mobile phone provider. The authorities said they were searching for alleged large-scale tax evasion. Geocell, which is part of Swedish telecoms group TeliaSonera, denied the allegations.
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(News report from Issue No. 172, published on Feb. 19 2014)
FEB. 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbek tech developers, possibly under orders from the authorities, unveiled their version of twitter called bamboo.uz. Opponents of the government have described bamboo, which lets users post messages of up to 700 characters, as another attempt to control social media.
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(News report from Issue No. 172, published on Feb. 19 2014)
FEB. 18 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbek president Islam Karimov wants to build Uzmobile, a subsidiary of Uztelecom, into a new national mobile phone operator. Uzbekistan has been trying, and failing, to sell kit left by Russia’s MTS when it quit Uzbekistan in 2012 after a row with the authorities over tax.
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(News report from Issue No. 172, published on Feb. 19 2014)
JAN. 30 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — KCell, Kazakhstan’s largest mobile telecoms provider, posted full year net profit for 2013 up 2.5% to $408m mainly driven by increased demand for 3G data services. The company, majority owned by Sweden’s TeliaSonera, said mobile penetration measured 180% by the end of 2013. This high penetration rate is an indicator of development.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
FEB. 2 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan will launch its second telecoms satellite in 2017, media reported quoting the state-owned Azercosmos. Azerbaijan launched its first telecoms satellite from French Guyana in February 2013. It is used by companies across the South Caucasus and Central Asia.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
JAN. 23 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — MTS, the Russian telecoms firm, is reportedly negotiating with Uzbekistan on ways to re-enter the country.
In an interview with Russian media Vladimir Yevtushenko, chairman of Sistema which owns MTS, said that he was already negotiating the company’s return to Uzbekistan.
“Yes, I participate, but there are no predictions,” Mr Yevtushenko said in response to a question by a reporter from the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti on whether he was personally involved in negotiations over MTS potential return to Uzbekistan.
“Being out, well, not working (in Uzbekistan), is also good. Today, for us it is all history. Of course, a return would be good for MTS and for Uzbekistan but, as they say, the devil always lies in the details.”
MTS says that it was chased out of Uzbekistan, where it did have about half the mobile phone subscriber market, in 2012 after a series of tax cases were launched against it. Since then the Uzbek authorities have confiscated MTS equipment in Uzbekistan and unsuccessfully tried to auction it off.
But as well as negotiating with the Uzbek authorities, reports said that MTS has also started proceedings against Uzbekistan at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).
For investors, the MTS dispute has become an important yardstick for measuring the problems of doing business in Uzbekistan.
This makes MTS’s carrot and stick approach, both negotiating and prosecuting through the courts, important to watch.
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(News report from Issue No. 169, published on Jan. 29 2014)
JAN. 23 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian telecoms firm MTS is negotiating with Uzbekistan on possibly re-entering the country after quitting in 2012 over tax disputes, the chairman of its parent company Sistema, Vladimir Yevtushenko, told Russian media. At the same time reports say that MTS is challenging Uzbekistan in the international courts for its assets.
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(News report from Issue No. 169, published on Jan. 29 2014)
JAN. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Another Chinese company opened up a factory in Uzbekistan. Under a joint venture with Uzbek partners, Puyang Sanshun Commerce Co. ltd will produce mobile phones and tablets in the Navoi Economic Free Zone, media reported. The Navoi Free Economic Zone has attracted a clutch of companies from Korea and China.
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(News report from Issue No. 168, published on Jan. 22 2014)
