Belarus
Telekom Austria continued its expansion strategy with the acquisition of MDC (Velcom) in Belarus in October 2007.
Compared to its neighboring countries, Belarus has a low mobile penetration rate, even though it rose from 85.1% to 99.4% compared to 2008. Despite a 10.9% increase in the number of subscribers to 4.1 million, Velcom’s market share decreased by 2.1 percentage points to 42.7%.
However, the company remained the second-largest operator. In 2009 the share of contract customers stood at 75.8% following a slight decline. Due to the difficult economic situation and a devaluation of the currency, average revenues per user fell by 16.4% to EUR 6.1 despite a tariff adjustment.
