Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Something afoot with TeliaSonera and the Latvian companies

TeliaSonera regional honcho Kenneth Karlberg has called a press conference for December 8 at 1430 regarding talks with the government commission discussing whether to privatize the government's remaining holdings in Latvian Mobile Telephone/LMT (28 % directly) and Lattelekom (51 %).
There may have been a breakthrough. The best scenario is that the government agrees in principle to sell both companies to TeliaSonera, which allows their integration and a single customer facing service platform ranging from fixed and mobile voice to sophisticated data services.
The worst case scenario is that Lattelekom gets renationalized in a swap of shares for LMT, the only prize that TeliaSonera wants almost at all cost. If there is no clear, fast exit scenario for the state from Lattelekom, look for the present management to probably leave. Lattelekom then, in the name of mechanical price competition, becomes a very cheap asset (fixed line being of limited, if not no future) for someone like Telefonica or TDC to snatch. They will then turn the company into a full spectrum service provider (TDC by linking Bite with Lattelekom).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I still hope, it's not the First scenario ! I do not like TS :-) Let them have LMT, full stop.

Anonymous said...

So was there a press conference and what were the news?

Anonymous said...

... and once again - shares owned by state owned enterprise <> directly owned