ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—The development of the pan-Russian Megafon project of St. Petersburg-based Telecominvest holding has prompted a series of acquisitions, as the initially “virtual” project reported 1 million clients in only one-half year of operation.
Megafon is the only Russian operator that possesses GSM licenses in the entire country. Its major competitors, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) and Vimpelcom (BeeLine), lack licenses in certain territories, however, their operation zones are much bigger than Megafon’s. But the de jure nationwide status of Megafon makes experts predict it will form the “troika” of nationwide operators in Russia jointly with its two main competitors, and numerous acquisitions and license transfers are therefore expected this year.
One recent Megafon-linked deal was the purchase by St. Petersburg-based Gamma Capital of a 50.2-percent stake in Inter-regional TransitTelecom (MTT), which is engaged in traffic transmission between GSM and NMT carriers. Market experts immediately said Gamma Capital was thus getting an indirect share in Megafon, as Telecominvest holds a 20-percent stake in MTT and plans to use it as the major Megafon traffic transmitter.
Besides, MTT owns a 45-percent stake in MTT-Invest, which in its turn possesses 49 percent of the Mobicom-Caucasus, Mobicom-Novosibirsk and Mobicom-Khabarovsk GSM carriers that have recently merged into Megafon.
“Thanks to the purchase of MTT, the Gamma Capital becomes an indirect co-owner of Megafon assets,” said Anton Pogrebinsky from J’Son & Partners Telecom consultancy in Moscow.
In a related development, the St. Petersburg-based North-Western GSM carrier, the backbone of Megafon, obtained complete control over two small regional operators in the northwest of the country. It had a 50.5-percent stake in Alfa Telecom from the republic of Karelia and 51 percent of Beta Telecom from Pskov region, and now has acquired 100 percent of the capital by paying a total of US$500,000.
Experts assessed the deal as “strange” as both carriers are NMT operators with a total of only 1,300 clients. However both were North-Western GSM agents in their respective territories.
“We know the people of the companies well, as they have been for a long time servicing our networks in Petrozavodsk (Karelian capital) and Pskov. Therefore, we were interested in acquiring a full control over the operators. We do not need their licenses at all,” an anonymous North-Western GSM top manager told the Kommersant newspaper, adding that the licenses will most likely be taken over by Delta-Telecom, an NMT carrier of Telecominvest.
In its turn, Telecominvest continued to increase its near-total control of the Uralsky GSM carrier in the Urals, which is also part of Megafon. Telecominvest purchased a small 1.13-percent stake of Khantymansijskokrtelecom Company. It acquired 776 shares for a total of 543,200 rubles (US$18,000).
