A series of announcements in the last few days have served to underline the increasingly important role played by Sistema-backed Comstar-UTS in Russia’s electronic communications marketplace.
Eric Franke, Comstar-UTS’s president and CEO, says the company is a telco rather than broadcaster, focusing its attention on such areas as interactive TV and IP over broadband. And certainly, the success it has enjoyed to date with its broadband Internet service Stream has been impressive.
At present, 90% of Comstar-UTS’s fixed infrastructure is able to provide broadband services at speeds of between 1Mbps and 8Mbps, and in some instances even higher. This has allowed the company to grow its broadband subscriber base to over 400,000, with 20% of the total receiving the IPTV service Stream TV.
Employing both ADSL and ADSL2+ technology, Stream TV already offers around 90 TV channels, of which four are proprietary, and a range of services including VOD and games, and looks set to introduce HDTV in the future.
Comstar-UTS secured a 25% plus one share blocking stake in the leading Russian telco Svyazinvest last December for €985 million and, according to Franke, is now taking a three level approach towards the company. The first, related to corporate governance, is already up and running, while the second will involve investigating possible synergies, which may include repeating Comstar-UTS’s already successful business model in other parts of the country. The third will meanwhile look at the possible restructuring and privatisation of Svyazinvest, which is still majority owned by the state.
Despite its status as a telco, Comstar-UTS looks more than likely to become a key player in the Russian TV industry, both in the lucrative Moscow market and in other parts of the country.
