On November 28, 2003Siberia Telecom and Alcatel will celebrate 10 years of business partnership. Moreover, joint stock coampny Siberia Telecom will be celebrating its first anniversary as a merged telecom company operating in the Siberian federal district.
A year ago, on November 30, 2002, eleven regional telecom operators formed a merger and established Siberia Telecom. This company combined powerful technical, economic and intellectual potential. Siberia Telecom currently provides telecom services on the territory of the entire Siberian federal district with a population of 20.9 million except for the Republicof Tyva. The number of lines in services exceeds 3.5 million and the total number of cellular subscribers serviced by Siberia Telecom and its wholly owned subsidiaries is 424,000 as of November 1, 2003.
Over the past year Siberia Telecom has achieved impressive results. The company’s market cap in 2003 rose by 24% and reached $446.5 million. As attested by Expert RA rating agency, the company now ranks 38th among the largest Russian companies in terms of their market cap. International rating agency Fitch upgraded its long-term credit rating to B+ and Standard&Poor's assigned a corporate governance rating of 5.7.
The company entered 151,000 new lines into service during the first 10 months of this year and commissioned 371 km of fiber optic telecom lines. The introduction of fiber optic lines has allowed Siberia Telecom to boost the handling capacity of its channels and roll out multi-media services in the region, such as data transmission, Internet and cable TV. These facilities are being used to carry out e-education programs, telemedicine, e-commerce, automate services provided by regional government agencies, as well as services available to the general public and business structures in the Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Tomskand Kemerovoregions, as well as Altai and Krasnoyarskterritories. Work has also begun under a pilot project to launch a multi-media satellite-based telecom system in the Krasnoyarskterritory, where 20 land-based satellite stations are being installed. This will make it possible to provide telephone services and Internet connections to people in hard-to-access areas.
The company has also made great efforts to implement Electronic Russia (ER), a federal outreach program. Under ER, hundreds of schools, middle and high schools in the region are connected to the Internet and a number of high-quality long-distance learning projects are made available. Specialists at Siberia Telecom are also working to build corporate networks for Sberbank of Russia, the Federal Treasury of Russia, the Pension Fund, the Tax Ministry and a number of other state institutions and business structures.
This year Siberia Telecom marks the 10-year anniversary of its partnership with Alcatel. The partnership began back in 1993 with the delivery of Alcatel switching equipment with a capacity of 25,460 ports for the Novosibirsk Municipal Telephone Network (NMTN), which was subsequently transferred to Siberia Telecom. The current total capacity of Alcatel equipment used by Siberia Telecom is in excess of 560,000 ports. As a result of this partnership urban switching facilities in this federal region have reached a 55% digitalization level.
