You're reading: Kyivstar boosts sales of mobile Internet modems by 2.1 times in 2010

Kyivstar Company, a Ukrainian business unit of VimpelCom Ltd., which includes mobile operators Kyivstar and Beeline-Ukraine, sold 315,000 mobile Internet modems in 2010, which was 2.1 times up on 2009.

As the company said on Wednesday, the sales growth was achieved due to a reduction in prices and an offer of promotion-based traffic.

The total number of modems sold since 2008 was 500,000 units, while the volume of data transmission through Kyivstar’s radio network last year reached 2,500 terabytes (about two million files with movies).

The total number of mobile Internet users by the end of 2010 was about 1.8 million subscribers, said the company.

"Revenues from mobile data transfer services grow and also become a significant part of total income," Kyivstar said without providing detailed indicators.

The company also points out that multimedia services earned Hr 326 million for it last year, which was about 3 percent of the company’s total annual revenue, including Hr 135 million from the sale of digital music.

Kyivstar adds that 57 million music tracks of almost three thousand young bands and musicians, which is equivalent to about four million CDs, were downloaded from the portal established under the DJUICE brand. In addition, the voting and rating system allowed the company to select the most popular contacts and offer it on a commercial basis, where they are sold as ringtones, full tracks and D-Jingles.

According to the report, revenues from the home-based Internet in 2010 increased by 104.4 percent, to Hr 97.7 million. This was largely achieved by expanding by 60 percent the geography of broadband access on the basis of FTTB [fiber-to-the-building] and increase the capacity of Internet channels from 40 Gbps to 95 Gbps.

Over the year, home-based broadband Internet from Kyivstar was connected to more than two million apartments in 21,000 residential buildings in 37 cities and towns, yet the number of subscribers is still about 266,000 million customers. Revenues from FTTB accounted for a mere 1.3 percent of Kyivstar’s overall revenues in 2010. However, the company claims that this direction is a potential driver of the operator’s revenues.

It was reported the net aggregate income of Vimpelcom Ltd.’s assets in Ukraine in 2010 decreased by 0.3 percent, to Hr 12.489 billion, while its OIBDA increased by 2.5percent, to Hr 6.696 billion, and capital investments increased by 37.9 percent, to Hr 2.005 billion.

Vimpelcom Ltd.’s revenues from mobile communications in Ukraine by the end of 2010 rose by 0.2 percent, to Hr 11.927 billion.