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

We have launched commercial 3G network in Belarus this week. The network is based on the HSPA+ technology, allowing up to 21 Mbit/s download and 11 Mbit/s upload speeds. The network is currently available in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, and will be expanded to the major cities and regional centers of the country by the end of the year.

In addition, we have fulfilled our 3G license requirement for the commercial 3G network in Russia following the launch of the network in the last remaining federal subject, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. As of today, MTS has commercial 3G networks in all Russian federal subjects.

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:

Our English-language corporate website has recently been named the best in Russia in 2009 by H&H Webranking. H&H Webranking conducts surveys of capital market participants such as the financial analysts, investors, business journalists and jobseekers, so as to review such aspects as availability of information, ease of access and frequency of updates of corporate websites.
 
“Mobile TeleSystems took a huge step forward from last year’s 20th position. Climbing 20 positions in one year... to the company in Russia that best fulfils the demands from the international capital market is very impressive,” says Marcus Eriksson, head of H&H Webranking.

3G network in Moscow, as of January 15, 2010.

At the end of December 2009, we launched our commercial 3G network in Moscow, complementing our existing coverage in the Moscow region and throughout Russia. At the time of launch, our network consisted of 197 base stations, which allowed us to offer extensive coverage within the MKAD (the so-called beltway, or highway, that surrounds Moscow) to a population of over 10 million.  By the end of January, we will have installed up to 300 base stations to serve Russia's capital.  For the latest network map, click here.

We estimate that data traffic has already increased 2-3 times in areas where both 2G and 3G networks are available, compared to the traffic prior to the launch of 3G. Currently, we have a variety of special tariffs for 3G users, including unlimited ones.

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.

On Thursday, November 19, 2009, Dr. Michael Hecker gave an interview on Sky News. In the clip below, Dr. Hecker shares his thoughts on the current trends in the telecommunications industry including our recent acquisition of a controlling stake of Comstar-UTS by MTS.

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.