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Weekly Lists
November 2, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 25
bne:TMT
Kyrgyzstan gives up on Alfa Telecom privatisation after nearly a decade
The Kyrgyz government has opted against including state-owned mobile operator Alfa Telecom in its submitted draft privatisation programme for 2018-2020. It appears to have given up on the sell- off of a 100% stake in the telco after nearly a decade of efforts.
Alfa Telecom is the absolutely dominant player on the Kyrgyzstan’s telecommunications market, covering 98% of the country’s mobile communications with 3mn subscribers.
Alfa Telecom CJSC was established in 2009 by Alexey Eliseyev,
an associate of Maksim Bakiyev, son of the then Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, whose regime was toppled in a revolution in 2010. The company was nationalised in the wake of the upheaval but the government has been seeking to re-privatise the company ever since.
Lithuania-based fintech company WePower has converted a year’s worth of energy data from Estonia’s power grid operator Elering to tradable tokens on the Ethereum blockchain platform to facilitate power purchasing for end users.
Taking advantage of Elering’s complete smart energy meter coverage of Estonian energy users, WePower uploaded 26,000 hours and 24 terawatt-hours of production and consumption data to blockchain.
The data was then turned to 39bn “smart energy tokens,” tradable units that – WePower hopes – could replace the traditional power purchase contracts.
The fintech company is particularly looking to using the tokenised data to further the use of renewable energy in Estonia.
The size of the outsourcing industry in Bulgaria will nearly double by 2021, contributing 7.9% of GDP by 2021 with a revenue of BGN- 4bn (€2.01bn), a report from the Bulgarian Outsourcing Association showed. The industry is already expanding significantly and in 2017 it contributed 4.8% to GDP, up from 4.2% in 2016.
“The results of the outsourcing industry for 2017 are better than expected with the operating income increasing by 18.2% instead of the 13.5% forecasted in the previous report,” the association said in a press release.
Lithuanian fintech company WePower launches blockchain platform for green energy in Estonia
Outsourcing industry in Bulgaria to rise to 7.9% of GDP by 2021