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Continuing Strong Progress from Russia's 5th Largest Operator
Uralsvyazinform, the arm of Svyazinvest operating in the Ural region of Russia, has produced a strong set of results for the nine months ended September 2007. Revenues are up 25% at US$1,120m, while EBITDA has grown by 27% to US$842m. Not all of this gain reached the operating line, but this was still an impressive 19% up, at US$278m.
The company is a full service operator, offering a wide range of telecom services and most of these have produced good gains in revenue. The fixed line side of the business has seen a 55% increase in long distance traffic (to $137m) while local urban services are up 11.4% at $275m. The mobile operation is the fifth largest in Russia and this has raised revenues by 29% to $352m, or 33% of the total. The star of the show, at least in proportionate terms, was the Internet & Data Services side, which grew by 65% to $92m.
The company divides its mobile service operations into four, which represent aggregations of its various regional licences within the Urals. These are the town of Perm and the regions of Sverdlovsk, Tyumen (including the Khanty-Mansyisk and Tamalo-Netetski autonomous districts) and the Chelyabinsk and Kurgan regions. The chart below shows the growth in customer numbers in each of these four in the recent past. The average growth rate over the period has been 7.4% quarterly, but three of the four regions have comfortably exceeded this, Chelyabinsk being the exception.
Russian regional operators can face very different market conditions from region to region, with the number of licensed operators varying from two to eight, but overall Uralsvyazinform believes that it has around 30% market share in the region by customer numbers and 40% by revenue. Its ARPU for the nine months amounts to $9.5 which is in line with that of MTS and Vimpelcom, its larger national rivals, which suggests that some of the smaller operators in the region are generating materially less revenue per customer.
Posted to the site on 27th November 2007
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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