Beeline has found a secret road to Georgia
Vimpelcom announced the purchase of a 51% stake in the Georgian company Mobitel, which owns a license to provide cellular services in the GSM-1800 standard. Formally, the license covers the entire territory of Georgia, but the de facto unrecognized republic of Abkhazia finds itself outside the zone of the operator. The controlling stake in Mobitel cost VimpelCom $ 12.6 million. This stake was acquired not directly, but through an offshore Water Trail Holdings from the British Virgin Islands, while with its former owner, GMC Group , VimpelCom signed an option for repurchase of the remaining 49% of the shares of the Georgian operator.
The main business of GMC Group is the construction of shopping centers in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia. At the same time, Mobitel was not its only telecommunication asset of the group: it also owns the Georgian mobile operator Megacom, which once worked in the AMPS standard, and subsequently closed its network and obtained a license for theCDMA-800 standard. It is noteworthy that so far the general public was unaware of the existence of “Mobitel”, and the company has not yet implemented its license, respectively, VimpelCom will have to build its network from scratch. However, as the press secretary of the Russian company Yulia Ostroukhova says, “with a cellular penetration rate of 30%, which is now observed in Georgia, the situation can be completely changed in our favor.”
Now the leaders of the Georgian cellular market are Geocell , owned by the Scandinavian TeliaSonera and Turkish Turkcell, and Magticom , which is owned by the American Metromedia International Group. In addition to having a fairly large subscriber base and already built networks, these players also have a frequency advantage over VimpelCom: their licenses cover both the 1800 MHz band and the 900 MHz band, which allows them to reduce their production costs. Moreover, Magticom also has a license for cellular services in the GSM-compatible UMTS standard.
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However, Russian analysts are confident that VimpelCom made a good deal. “The price of $ 12.6 million looks somewhat overpriced, but it must be understood that telecom assets in the world are already overvalued,” says Anton Pogribinsky ofACM-Consulting . “For example, most recently the third GSM-license in Egypt was sold for $ 2.9 billion at all .”
“VimpelCom has experience of successful development of the acquired operator from scratch in the Urals, so we can expect that the company will quickly take over the market,” agrees Margarita Zobnina from Prime-Consult. - The circumstances that the penetration of mobile communication in Georgia is at a low level for this country should play to his advantage, and thanks to the compact living of the population, it is possible to quickly cover all the necessary territory. Moreover, thanks to the perfect deal, VimpelCom was able to close its entry into the Georgian market to its main competitors - MTS , which practically had no opportunity to settle in this country. ” “We are interested in the market of Georgia, as well as the markets of all the CIS countries in which we are not yet present,” said MTS spokesman Kirill Alyavdin. “However, when acquiring assets, we proceed, first of all, from the economic feasibility of these transactions.”
The main business of GMC Group is the construction of shopping centers in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia. At the same time, Mobitel was not its only telecommunication asset of the group: it also owns the Georgian mobile operator Megacom, which once worked in the AMPS standard, and subsequently closed its network and obtained a license for the
Now the leaders of the Georgian cellular market are Geocell , owned by the Scandinavian TeliaSonera and Turkish Turkcell, and Magticom , which is owned by the American Metromedia International Group. In addition to having a fairly large subscriber base and already built networks, these players also have a frequency advantage over VimpelCom: their licenses cover both the 1800 MHz band and the 900 MHz band, which allows them to reduce their production costs. Moreover, Magticom also has a license for cellular services in the GSM-compatible UMTS standard.
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However, Russian analysts are confident that VimpelCom made a good deal. “The price of $ 12.6 million looks somewhat overpriced, but it must be understood that telecom assets in the world are already overvalued,” says Anton Pogribinsky of
“VimpelCom has experience of successful development of the acquired operator from scratch in the Urals, so we can expect that the company will quickly take over the market,” agrees Margarita Zobnina from Prime-Consult. - The circumstances that the penetration of mobile communication in Georgia is at a low level for this country should play to his advantage, and thanks to the compact living of the population, it is possible to quickly cover all the necessary territory. Moreover, thanks to the perfect deal, VimpelCom was able to close its entry into the Georgian market to its main competitors - MTS , which practically had no opportunity to settle in this country. ” “We are interested in the market of Georgia, as well as the markets of all the CIS countries in which we are not yet present,” said MTS spokesman Kirill Alyavdin. “However, when acquiring assets, we proceed, first of all, from the economic feasibility of these transactions.”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/4161/
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