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Articles & publications
05.08.2010
NWT gets down to businessComNews
Viktor Loginov
North-West Telecom, a fixed-line monopoly holder in the North-West Federal District of Russia, gas received permission from the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) to acquire 100% of the shares of Severen Telecom. As a result of this takeover, NWT could dramatically strengthen its positions on the corporate telecommunications market in Saint Petersburg.
Severen Telecom is one of the leaders among second-tier Petersburg operators, which commands 10% of the corporate client market, according to the company’s own estimates. As a matter of fact, the operator has won tenders several years for the provision of telecom services and Internet access for FK Zenit.
Operations aimed at taking over Severen Telecom had been under way for nearly a year, after which the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service approved the takeover, and NWT was given permission to perform the transaction. “NWT controls some 80% of the corporate telecom market in all regions of the North-West except for St. Petersburg, the corporate market which the operator failed to enter back around the beginning of the 1990s.
Now, thanks to the takeover of Severen Telecom, NWT will gain access to 150 business centers of some 800 which operate in the city. On the strength of the takeover of Severen Telecom, NWT will easily rank among the top ten corporate client telecom service providers in Saint Petersburg”, according to the general director of news agency TelecomDaily Denis Kuskov.
There are also less optimistic forecasts. “I think that this transaction will have no impact on the leadership status of the Saint Petersburg market. If NWT were really interested in conquering the corporate market it would have done this long ago. NWT has 270,000 corporate client lines in the city, while Severen Telecom, with a total of just 9,000 lines. Admittedly, the situation can be viewed from the opposite side, as NWT has a subscriber base numbering 43,000 corporate clients in the city, while Severen Telecom has only about 3,000, and in this sense the rise in the subscriber base looks more sizeable”, the general director of analytical agency Rustelecom Yury Bryukvin claims.
Despite the fact that the FAS has given its permission to take over Severen Telecom, people at NWT say the deal still might not go through. “Neither the management board nor the board of directors of the company has approved this transaction yet, and there is no guarantee it will be considered at the next meeting. The merged company has nearly been formed, and while the strategy for cellular assets has almost been devised, the fixed-line strategy is still not in place. In any case, if the transaction goes through, we’ll be lucky if this happens by the end of the year”, explains deputy general director for corporate relations of NWT Ella Tomilina.
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