Beeline Goes To Ukraine

[Effendi]

Russia's VimpelCom to launch Beeline brand in Ukraine next year

LONDON, Dec 6 (Prime-Tass) -- Russia?s second-largest mobile operator VimpelCom plans to offer mobile services under the Beeline brand in Ukraine hrough its local subsidiary in five to six months, VimpelCom's CEO Alexander Izosimov told Prime-Tass Tuesday.

VimpelCom entered the Ukrainian market on November 11 by purchasing Ukrainian Radiosystems mobile operator (URS), which operates under the WellCOM and MOBI brand names, for a total of U.S. $231.3 million.

URS has a GSM 900 license that covers the entire territory of Ukraine, which has a population of approximately 47.6 million people. URS also has a GSM 1800 license that covers 23 of Ukraine's 27 regions (excluding Kiev, the Kiev Region, the Dnipropetrovsk Region and the Odessa Region).

URS? subscriber base amounted to 160,204 people, or less than 1% of the market, as of October 1.

VimpelCom is a leading international provider of telecommunications services, operating under the Beeline brand in Russia and Kazakhstan.

VimpelCom's consolidated subscriber base totaled 41.429 million people as of October 31, according to Advanced Communications & Media (AC&M).

It's quite incredible to read that WellCom has just 160k customers, that's really little, how could they survive? In fact Vimpelcom bought that operator. Anyway Ukrainian GSM market seems to be very strange, they have 5 operators and 8 brands, but only Kyivstar and UMC (MTS group) seem to have a great success, the others have really few customers.