The communications industry suffered a crisis 2015 without serious consequences.

According to representatives of leading mobile operators, the main problem is to optimize the cost of building networks - taking into account the unstable exchange rate of the ruble and the need for settlements with contractors in foreign currency.

In a crisis, many companies had to find a compromise between planned development and minimizing costs. Thus, MTS was forced to reduce the development program, analyzing the importance of new projects and postponing tasks with low priority. At the same time, the size of investments in rubles remained at the same level - according to the representative of MTS Dmitry Solodovnikov, the company spent 73 billion rubles for the first three quarters of 2015.

VimpelCom chose another tactic of development in an unstable economy. As noted by Alexander Popovsky, the executive vice-president for strategy and business development, the company was able to negotiate with a part of the equipment suppliers for some renegotiation of the terms of the concluded agreements and for payment in rubles. But Megafon, in the words of its representative, Yulia Dorokhina, made a bid to attract borrowed funds in a stable currency. Thus, Unicredit Bank Austria AG, under Finnvera’s guarantees, provided a domestic operator with a loan of 150 million euros for the purchase of Nokia Solutions and Networks equipment (NSN), while China Development Bank opened a $ 600 million credit line to Megafon.
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Despite the crisis, there is still a steady growth in the Russian telecommunications industry, albeit lower compared to previous years - the overall statistics are being brought by the mobile communications segment, which accounts for more than half of all market revenues. According to analysts from TMT Consulting, the growth of the market in 2015 will be 2.1%, and the revenue of operators will increase by 1.2%. The development of the market should be grateful, first of all, to the segment of pay-TV, which showed an increase of 21.3%. Internet access received + 5.3% compared with 2014, but the income of fixed-line operators, on the contrary, decreased by 8.1%.

According to VimpelCom forecasts, a new crisis is expected to increase in the new year, which will contribute to lower incomes of the population, as a result of which people will no longer use certain services. Representatives of Rostelecom, who do not expect a quick improvement in the situation, echo the competition. However, this does not prevent the telecommunication company, together with Rosenergoatom, from planning to build the next year’s largest data center in Russia for 4,000 racks next year. Optimism is maintained only by Elena Dorokhina from MegaFon, who believes that subscribers are not ready to save on services they have already got used to. In addition, with the development of mobile Internet, the operator hopes to get more profit by increasing the amount of data consumed by subscribers.