A saturated market in Russia

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01 April 2007

Interview: Alexander Izosimov of VimpelCom. The mobile market in Russia is saturated, and VimpelCom's operations in neighbouring countries have a limited number of quarters of penetration growth, says CEO Alexander Izosimov. Now, having ended the Russian price war, he's persuading customers to use more services — and is looking for new markets to the south and east

Alexander Izosimov: VimpelCom knows how to build low cost operations fast and develop a model that allows good margins on the price levels We're used to the idea that the mobile industry has reached saturation in most of the highly industrialised economies of the world — Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong in the Asia Pacific; most western European countries from Scandinavia to Italy; not quite yet in North America, but getting there. Now, says VimpelCom CEO Alexander Izosimov, saturation's hit Russia too. "Russia's at a very interesting stage," he says. It's reaching saturation point. "It's now over 100% penetrated and the question we have to answer is: what's next?" And how does everyone get there, he adds. The last year or so is Russia has been dramatic, he adds. "We have managed to persuade all the competition in Russia to abandon the price wars and that has allowed us to stabilise the...

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