IR Blog

We are proud to share two articles in the Financial Times published this week, reporting on MTS and our content portal, Omlet.ru. We have talked about Omlet.ru in this blog before and it has recently received Meffys award.

During our trip to New York to celebrate the 10th anniversary of listing on the NYSE, Mikhail Shamolin, President and CEO of MTS, met with the Financial Times journalists. Mikhail talked about content distribution in Russia, how we can overcome the piracy grip, and why MTS has a window of opportunity to carve a strong position in the potentially lucrative content market.

Here are the articles:

Financial Times, Russian Omlet mushrooms with legal downloads

Financial Times, Russia’s MTS in talks to boost web content

Pavel Roytberg, Director for Products and Services at MTS Russia, receives the GSMA Global Mobile Award.

We have attended the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week and wanted to share some highlights of MTS at the show for the readers of our blog.

In a video interview below with Light Reading TV, Dr. Michael Hecker, Vice President for Strategy and Corporate Development at MTS, discusses the rising demand for data in our markets, our growth outlook and plans for LTE.



There have also been a number of announcements at the show relevant to MTS:

MTS is pleased to announce that we launched the first MTS Comstar bundle offer – the STREAM Versatile Box product – through our retail stores in Moscow and Zelenograd, a Moscow suburb, in December 2009. This is one of the first steps of our previously announced Comstar integration plans following our acquisition of the company in October 2009.

In early September, we launched the new Red Energy tariff, aimed at the youth segment. The ad above is currently running on Russian television.

As part of the new advertising campaign, our marketing team implemented an innovative way to interact with customers, merging the print ad medium and the website, called augmented reality. Application of augmented reality in marketing is still in its infancy, and we are proud to be the first company in Russia to apply it. We have recorded a video with our partners, JWT International and Lemonade Animation, explaining how it works (click below to view it).

Last week, we launched Omlet.ru – an online and mobile content portal that offers the largest selection of licensed videos, music and games. The goal behind this is to further stimulate our content revenues, which already contribute significantly to our performance. For example, content revenues for the full year 2008 were around 9 billion rubles with the second quarter 2009 revenues growing 31% year-on-year.

The new content portal is unique to our markets as it offers a high degree of interoperability between mobile devices and PCs / laptops as well as the necessary flexibility in terms of access network (e.g. EDGE vs. 3G) and phone model. Omlet.ru also offers a “dual delivery” system, whereby purchased music tracks can be downloaded to both a mobile device and a computer.