Kyivstar Group of Companies consists of five businesses and there will be more – CEO
The Kyivstar Group of Companies currently consists of five businesses, there will be more, and their management with the creation of supervisory boards is aimed at building a complementary system and maintaining the competitiveness and leadership position of each individual business, said Kyivstar CEO Oleksandr Komarov.
"We do not integrate all these services into Kyivstar and do not manage them like a large Kyivstar," he said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
To understand the specifics of management, Komarov gave the example of the infrastructure company UTC (Ukraine Tower Company), which is 100% owned by Kyivstar.
"We adhere to the principle of Arm's-Length-Based, and manage this business as a shareholder through a quasi-supervisory board... At the UTC supervisory board, we decided that if we seriously develop passive infrastructure and build a full-fledged player, the company should be capable of building towers not only for Kyivstar," explained the CEO of Kyivstar.
According to him, as a result, UTC builds towers not only for Kyivstar.
Komarov also emphasized that UTC's business is significantly different from the mobile operator's business and has a different economy: the level of investment, the terms of return on these investments and risks.
"This is closer to real estate than to the telecom business," he added.
The Kyivstar CEO noted that another example is Kyivstar.Tech, which is also managed through a quasi-supervisory board.
"As for Helsi and Uklon, they have full-fledged supervisory boards. That is, we are not integrating these businesses, but leaving them as competitive businesses in their segment. Moreover, our task, as a strategic investor, is to preserve and strengthen their leadership positions," Komarov emphasized.
He reported that a similar path is planned with Kyivstar-TV: "We want to separate the platform into a virtual structure in the near future so that it lives and develops as an independent project, based on its own goals, and not on the goals of the shareholders who invest in it."
The CEO emphasized that Kyivstar is determined to implement the strategy of transformation into a digital operator. According to him, it has three important elements. The first is to maintain a more or less adequate level of business growth: telecom and digital, the second is to maintain an adequate level of margin, and the third is to increase the share of digital business.
"We are exceeding the indicators that we declared last summer: then 15% [share of digital business in revenues] was announced for 2028, and now, especially with the acquisition of Uklon, we are striving to achieve a significantly higher share of revenues from digital services. And we are moving in this direction... As for 50%, this is an ambition for the next few years," the CEO said.
As Komarov explained, the company plans to achieve a 50% share of digital business in three ways, the first of which is organic.
"If the telecom business is growing by about 9-10% year on year, then the digital business in 2024 grew by 122%! Yes, then it was not as big as it is today with the purchase of Uklon, the development of Helsi, with the further penetration of KyivstarTV, but even this year, I think the growth will be much faster in the digital business," the CEO noted.
According to him, the second way is to grow through acquisitions. The company has a strategy for the digital business segments in which it wants to be present. This strategy has its own logic for attracting clients and creating synergies between the different elements of the digital ecosystem.
Komarov called the third way the opportunity to create new digital products within Kyivstar. He reported that B2B products will grow approximately twice this year, and the main drivers are cloud services and Big Data.
As another example, he cited the company's participation in a joint project with the Ministry of Digital Transformation to develop a national large language model. In his opinion, this will develop the company's expertise to bring it to the level of one of the best in the field of artificial intelligence and will allow creating a competitive advantage for the development of products and processes: agents in various areas, modernization of the contact center.
"We would like, for example, our company Kyivstar.Tech, which currently receives the lion's share of its income from Kyivstar, to increase its income from other clients every year," he added.