Ukraine’s biggest fixed-line telephony operator Ukrtelecom JSC has released its annual report for 2015, saying it made Hr 6.8 billion ($260 million) in revenues and paid Hr 2 billion ($76 million) in taxes to the state.
Ukrtelecom CEO Yuriy Kurmaz told journalists at a March 22 news conference in Kyiv that the company’s net profit had grown by 3.3 percent, comparing with 2014, to hit Hr 445 million.
The company ended 2015 with additional Hr 584 million in revenues, despite ending the first and the last quarters with losses (of Hr 166 million in Q1 and Hr 48 million in Q4), caused, Kurmaz said, by the writing off of assets lost due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
According to the company’s report, about 60 percent of all revenues came from the business to consumers segment, with the remaining 40 percent being split equally between business to business sales and business with other operators.
“All these (revenues) came despite us not investing much,” Kurmaz said. “It would just be a waste of money without a change in strategy.”
This year, however, Ukrtelecom will start “the largest-scale modernization in Ukrtelecom’s history,” in cooperation with the China Development Bank and Huawei, a Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment company, Kurmaz said.
He said the company planned to invest in infrastructure to be able to offer more services, particularly Internet access, to more areas of the country.
He said about 75 percent of Ukrtelecom’s 1.6 million subscribers use only telephony, while 24 percent use telephony and Internet services. Only 1 percent of Ukrtelecom subscribers consume telephony, the Internet and Internet Protocol television (IPTV) together.
But a proportionally larger share of the telecom giant’s income came from IPTV and Internet services, Kurmaz said.
The company’s revenues from fixed-line telephony decreased by 2 percent, to Hr 3.23 billion in 2015. Internet services, in contrast, brought the company Hr 1.323 billion, which is 11 percent more than in 2014.
By the end of the year, Ukrtelecom had also cut back staff by about 32,000 employees.
Earlier this year a member of Ukrainian parliament, Serhiy Leshchenko, said Serhiy Lyovochkin, a lawmaker and ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s former chief of staff, was tied to the $1.3 billion privatization of state-owned Ukrtelecom, although Lyovochkin denies he is connected to the company.
Currently, Ukrtelecom belongs to Ukrainian businessman and oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, whose SCM conglomerate bought Ukrtelecom in June 2013 from Cyprus-registered Epic Telecom Invest Ltd.
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