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Leaders
December 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 10
shareholders to organise an orderly transition to a new management structure if Volozh were to die.
Capping foreign ownership
While Volozh didn't directly address the new draft law capping the foreign ownership in his email, clearly the changes are a result of the general problem of the increasingly important role of tech companies in the make up of a country’s economy and the legitimate national security concerns. Following the Second World War European countries adopted national agricultural policies as food supplies became a question of national security, and today technology has reached the same point. Tech is the new grain.
The bill introduced to the State Duma by lawmaker Anton Gorelkin, prohibiting foreign legal entities from owning more than 20% of internet information resources deemed significant for Russian infrastructure, follows on from a similar law that banned foreigners from owning 20% of
press outlets in 2015 that caused a major shake- up in the industry.
Gorelkin has admitted that his bill is specifically aimed at Yandex and Mail.ru. According to him, Yandex is exactly the type of company it seeks to regulate: it’s registered in the Netherlands, 85% of its charter capital is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, and 49.2% of its voting rights belong to founder Volozh, who is a citizen of Malta as well as Russia.
“In reality, however, the presidential administration – specifically deputy chief of staff Sergey Kiriyenko, who oversees domestic policy – is behind both laws, according to several sources in internet companies and the federal bureaucracy. And, in this campaign, the bureaucracy and security agencies have found common cause with businessmen tied to the Russian state,” Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in a paper recently.
Russian mobile major MTS presents customer lifetime value strategy
Russian mobile major Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) has presented a new strategy, called CLV 2.0 (customer lifetime value), which will replace the previous 3D strategy (data, digital, dividends).
As reported by bne IntelliNews, MTS is Russia's most valuable telecom brand and maintains stable growth in Russia. The company has just announced the sale of its Ukrainian unit for $700mn.
The new strategy of MTS will consider total return from a customer during his or her life (lifetime value or LTV) expressed though average revenue per user (ARPU) and churn rate.
MTS expects the new strategy to result in revenue and Ebitda growth in 2020-22, though it has not
specified by how much. Sberbank CIB estimated a 3.5% and 3.9% growth, respectively.
The ultimate target is to provide a set of services – connectivity (mobile, fixed line) and “digital services” (fintech, media, etc) – via a single MTS ID. This would mean growing the penetration of new services: fintech (from the current 2mn MTS Bank customers to 10mn by 2022), video and pay TV segment (4mn currently; 10mn target), the cloud and others.
In terms of investments, MTS does not expect the strategy to have a major impact. The operator expects stable telecom capex excluding costs related to the so-called Yarovaya data storage law and on top of that another 15-20% of the total in new areas.