I think that in general the company showed good results, and some financial figures (net profit, sales profit) even exceeded our targets. |
I think we will observe a trend of mobile services replacing fixed-line services (in Russia). This trend would lead to the migration of long-distance traffic from regional fixed-line companies to mobile operators. In addition, competition among regional fixed-line operators for generated long-distance traffic will increase. |
Our companies have monopoly status, which does not let them implement flexible tariff policy. And eventually it will affect their business efficiency. |
Our main task is to strengthen our position on the market through investment in the development of new services. |
The Russian and international experience shows that traditional fixed-line telephony development has been exhausted. In particular, traffic growth has been decelerating recently, so too has subscriber base growth. Clients need additional opportunities, such as high-speed access to the Internet, videoconferencing, multimedia applications and fixed-mobile convergence. |
We assume that in some segments (rural communications) and regional markets (remote districts) we remain monopolists. But there are markets where competition with mobile and alternative fixed-line operators is very high. And these are firstly major Russian cities. |
We hope that the system will not only allow us to minimize losses, but will be a major factor in the investment attractiveness of regional operators, and will create beneficial conditions to access world capital markets. |