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bne Tech
July 19, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 23
Russian mobile major Veon gets former Facebook exec for new Ventures unit
Russian mobile operator Veon (former Vimpel- com) will hire Sergi Herrero, an executive cur- rently with Facebook, to become the COO of the recently created Ventures division, the company said on July 15. The appointment will be effective from September 2019.
Herrero is Facebook’s global director of payments and commerce partnerships, which oversees the launch and growth of payment and commerce ca- pabilities for Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.
Before joining Facebook in 2014 he held several senior roles in technology, banking and consulting. For Veon, Herrero will formulate a strategy to grow beyond traditional connectivity, focusing on other adjacent products.
"Veon is apparently regrouping to make another push in non-telecom revenue," Maria Sukhanova of BCS Global Markets commented on July
16. "The success in that is not a given, but the strengthening of the team could provide a strong base," she believes, seeing the news as neutral for Veon at the moment.
The company showed 6% revenue decline to $2.2bn and EBITDA slipped by 4% to $0.82bn with a 39% margin in the first quarter of 2019. The company's results in 1Q19 were affected by weaker currencies in Russia and Pakistan, which if unaccounted for, would make 7% and 10% revenue and Ebitda growth respectively.
Hungarian and Czech super laser facilities to form consortium
Super laser research facilities in Hungary and the Czech Republic will form a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), which is ex- pected to start operating in January 2020, it was announced on July 15. Italy is expected to join first, and a number of other countries, such as Germany, France, and the UK, are also interested in the ERIC.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) is
the world’s first international laser research infrastructure. The project consists of three giant laser facilities in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania set up from funding from member states and the use of EU structural funds (ERDF).
It aims to host the most intense beamline system worldwide, develop new interdisciplinary research opportunities with light from these lasers and secondary radiaton derived from them, and make them available to an international scientific user community. It is the first project of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) to be fully implemented in the new EU member states.
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