Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (Russia) LLP | View firm profile
Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (Russia)��lawyers advised MTT Group on selling 100% of the shares in MTT, one of the top-10 biggest telecom companies in Russia and a leading provider of intelligent connectivity solutions for businesses, to Mobile TeleSystems PJSC.
This asset was purchased for RUB 5 bn. The transaction was cleared by the Federal Antimonopoly Service and closed.
“We were happy to contribute to handling the transaction. BCLP has accumulated extensive experience of working with MTT: in 2018, our team provided support to MTT Group in a management-buyout transaction. Such transactions remain a rare case on the Russian market and the sale of OJSC MTT to MTS is a good example of management successfully realising its strategy”, comments Matvey Kaploukhiy, Partner, Corporate/M&A Russia, who led the project team.
“We have come a long way from a “heavyweight” transit operator to the leader of Telecom API and Unified Communications markets in Russia as well. And we see that the choice in favor of MTT innovative strategy aimed at the conquest of these dynamically growing markets was the right one. Both areas are actively developing and will see explosive growth in the near future. The deal with MTS will open a new page in the history of MTT. The synergy of competencies in telecommunications, voice services and cloud services opens up new opportunities for the digital transformation of the business of our companies’ clients,” said MTT CEO Evgeny Vasiliev.
MTS expects that the deal will help it become a Russian market leader in Virtual Private Branch Exchanges (VBX) and Telecom APIs and strengthen its position in high-growth tech sectors such as ecommerce, telemedicine, eticketing, and ride-hailing and delivery.
MTT, founded in 1994, is the Russian market leader in providing intelligent services for business clients based on CPaaS communication platforms and API application programming communication interface. The company provides Virtual Private Branch Exchanges integrated with CRM customer interaction systems, allowing office automated telephone exchanges to be replaced and various corporate telecom services to be transferred the cloud; Telecom API solutions for integration and efficient management of multi-channel customer communications: virtual numbers, call management, voice bots, messaging management via messengers and SMS, E-mail marketing. The company cooperates with mobile and fixed network providers, provides international and intercity traffic, organizes all kinds of roaming and other B2O services.
To find out more about MTT at: www.mtt.ru.
The BCLP team was led by Matvey Kaploukhiy, Partner, Corporate/M&A, and Nikolay Kholshev, Counsel, M&A and Corporate Finance.
The project team included:
M&A and Corporate Finance:
Ian Ivory (Partner), Ruslan Nurullaev (Associate), Mikhail Erokhin (Associate), Gleb Aleksandrov (Paralegal)
Tax Advice and Controversy:
Anna Zelenskaya (Counsel), Denis Khramkin (Senior Associate)
International Trade: Lena Belozerova (Associate Director)
Real Estate: Inna Firsova (Counsel).