Russian Telecommunications Ownership Arbor Civilis

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 27, 2007

Russian Telecommunications Ownership Arbor Civilis

This month’s number of authoritative telecommunications magazine STANDARD has an extremely interesting add-on – the latest (as of July 10, 2007) arbor civilis of ownership of Russian telecommunications. I happened to know Leonid Konik way back in the 90-ies when he started his project comnews and it is rather comforting to find that now this is a well-established and popular news project involved in telecommunications. Anyways, the last titanic effort shows nicely who is who and WHAT is the Russian telecommunications sector. I think that the readers may find useful the links to web-sites that I am providing below.

First, it seems that there are eleven foreign entities that own some assets in Russia:
- Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) – has 19.9% equity in Metrosvayz Ltd
- GlobalStar L.P. (NASDAQ:GSAT) – 49% in Global Tel
- Sumitomo Corp.( TYO:8053) – 45% in Enforta B.V. that jointly with Baring Vostok Capital Partners (20%), EBRD (5%) owns “Prestige-Internet” (Enforta) Russian provider; also 20% in “New Telephone Company” (Vladivostok)
- Korea Telecom Corp.( NYSE:KTC) – 80% in “New Telephone Company” (Vladivostok)
- Tele2 AB (STO:TEL2 B) – 100% of “Tele2-Russia”
- France Telecom (NYSE:FTE) – through Equant N.V. – 100% of Russian “Equant” company
- Linx Telecommunications B.V. (Neterlands) – owns 100% of “Svyaz VSD” and 100% of “Linx Telecommunications CIS”
- Intel Capital has 25.4% in the whole bunch of Alfa Group telecommunications assets
- Telenor (OTC:TELNY) – 29.9% of Vimpelcom (NYSE:VIP)
- Telia Sonera AB (STO:TLSN) – 100% of "Telia Sonera International Carrier Russia”; 35.6% (indirectly) of MegaFon; 26.1% of Telecominvest

According to the chart four companies are public:
- Golden Telecom (NASDAQ:GLDN) – NASDAQ – 36.7% free float
- Vimpelcom (NYSE:VIP) – 24.4% free float
- Mobile Telesystems (NYSE:MBT) - 46.7% free float
- Comstar (LON:CMST) - 35% free float
We need to add ROSTELECOM (NYSE:ROS) here too.

So, now everyone interested may examine all the links and ownerships of Russian telecom sector.