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Weekly Lists
January 25, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 28
bne:TMT
Bulgarian eminence grise aims to consolidate Balkan telecoms market
Bulgarian businessman Spas Roussev is in the process of taking over mobile operator Telekom Albania and is also eyeing assets in Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia as he seeks to consolidate the Balkan telecoms market.
Roussev said in mid January he is holding talks with Deutsche Telekom on the takeover of the German telecom operator’s business in Romania, capital.bg reported. Later talks would also target Deutsche Telekom’s Macedonian operations.
Roussev, who claims that there is no politician in Bulgaria who would not pick up his call, has been called by Bulgarian media one of the grey cardinals with huge influence in the country. He prefers to stay away from the lights of the media. But having acquired BTC, Bulgaria’s largest telecom firm by revenue, back in 2016, he has now embarked on an attempted acquisition spree.
With 90mn users, Russia is Europe’s largest Internet market, East-West Digital News (EWDN) reported on January 16.
Last year Russia confirmed its rank as Europe’s largest Internet market with 90mn users aged 16 and older. Thus, according to a GfK study, Internet penetration exceeds 75% in the country.
The growth — up 3mn users from 2017 to 2018 — is mainly due to the older generation, where penetration is still low with 36% among those aged 55 years and more, but increasing gradually — whereas the youngest age groups are close to saturation.
The majority of users (61%, or 73mn people) use mobile devices to connect to the network, with almost one-third (32%) using mobile exclusively to access the network.
Across the EU, 7% of enterprises employing at least 10 people used industrial or service robots in 2018, but the figure is just 3% in four eastern member states — Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary and Roma- nia, Eurostat data shows.
Faced with a growing labour shortage, companies from Central and Eastern Europe outstripped those in other world regions in the pace of investments into industrial robots, but the data from Euro- stat shows that in absolute terms they still lag behind their peers from Western Europe.
Russia becomes Europe’s largest internet market
Eastern EU member states lag in robotisation