Thursday, August 25, 2005

Alise sells, Inna to count Kurds in Bayern

I have to be brief-- TietoEnator has bought 51% of the Latvian IT company IT Alise, which is one of the biggest with 200 employees. The reason - a good core of Oracle specialists (they set up the E-Business thing at Latvenergo) plus customers such as Lattelekom and Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT). More on that after the press conference...

Just as we were starting to have fun, Inna Steinbuka, the head of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, has been selected to head the Ethnic and regional Statistics Division at Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency. Probably a good move – Inna has a doctorate in economics and specializes in econometrics, the application of mathematic methods to statistics or something like that.
So this lady, who did a stint at the IMF, is probably off to swinging Luxemburg to oversee the counting of Kurds in Bavaria (Bayern) and stuff like that. But if you ask me, with 18 different markets to define and more than 200 operators (from LMT down to farmer Berzins' son running an ethernet cable to the next farm and calling himself an ISP) on the Latvian market, the other exit for Inna was probably under escort from gentle people in white coats to the rest home..Keep in mind that the entire Latvian regulator has as much staff as you would see smoking on coffee break outside the Ofcom/Oftel or whatever they call it office in London.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the reason why IT companies are bought in Latvia is because the aquired one is in risk of being out of business, so the buyer just takes it for cheap.

Anonymous said...

If fact there are 3 main reason to sell company:
- to expand- company is sold to one which delivers the most value for the company in long term- usually management remain unchanged
- capitalise work- company is sold to someone who can manage and control business with new management team
- to save your business - in this case investor buys assets, not shares and for cheap