Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Bills, bills, 30 million bills...

The Swedish Tele2 group has started moving its billing operations to Latvia. They will be, for now (with around 100 staff) operate out of the new Tele2 offices in Riga. With around 30 million customers, that's a lot of bills, but what the Latvian operation will do is prepare the electronic documentation for dispatch by the Latvian or some other postal service (so it will be one big e-mail to Germany rather than a container full of paper bills :) ).
The billing center in Latvia will eventually replace similar, more costly facilities in Sweden and Germany, as well as another facility in Estonia. The costs of operation in Estonia are not significantly different from Latvia, but Tele2 doesn't believe it can find enough qualified workers who understand English to staff a facility there.
This was all disclosed to me exclusively by Tele2's vice president in charge of the Baltic States, Russia and Croatia, Johnny Svedberg in an interview last Thursday. I must admit I didn't blog this immediately because I was worried about "blowback" to the Latvian media before the story was run by my day job newspaper. At the end of the week, there is a special danger that the weekend rags (those who publish on Saturday) will get the jump on the newspaper where I supposedly have a real job :). This was the case with the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission extending Tele2's spectrum rights for just six months, so we (on Monday) had to lead with the obvious that there could be an international shitstorm if the spectrum rights aren't extended after March 1, 2006. I also did a freelance piece for IDG News, an international IT and telecoms news agency that serves hundreds of IT magazines, newsletters and websites from Los Angeles to Albania (HQ for this company is in Boston, my home town, to the extent that a Latvian displaced person can have any such thing :) ). The story was a transcript of most of my interview with Svedberg, except for the purely Latvia-relevant parts. Watch for the Latvian version, well, whenever...

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