TOP ESTONIAN ENTERPRISES

EESTI TELEKOM AS
The Most Competitive
Communication and
IT-services Enterprise
2009
Leaders of the
information
society!
The fact that times have become
tougher is no particular news anymore.
What makes it special in case of
each enterprise is how they manage
to go along with the difficult times.
Looking at numbers, one could say
that there is no reason to be overly optimistic.
The director of Eesti Telekom
Valdo Kalm says that he is generally
an optimistic person, but he cannot
currently foresee a quick improvement
of the economic climate. Last
year, three companies in the group –
EMT, Elion and Microlink – developed
their own common vision, which was
consistently implemented in 2008 and
continues to be implemented. The vision
is simple and striking: “Leaders
of the information society!”
EMT, Elion and MicroLink are now jointly operating
in the name of improving the information
society. Last year, several meetings were held
with the management boards of subsidiaries
and thus the vision was born. At first, the slogan
“Leaders of the information society” might
sound very simple and obvious, but the reality
is quite different. “We see a long tunnel here, in
which there are different strategies. We began
to implement this in 2008 and started with the
project “Come along!”, which means internet
for 100,000 more people. In cooperation with the
“Let’s do it!“ team, we launched the “My Estonia”
project. It started with us thinking how to
use technology to the benefit of Estonia even
more. We could see that some changes were
needed here and this fits in well with the implementation
of our vision,” Kalm is convinced.
The “Come along!” project is in full swing, the internet
bus is driving around in places where it
has not been before. Including people in the internet
world is purely a project of the three subsidiaries
of Eesti Telekom. Telekom itself has
contributed quite a lot and part of the money was
received from the European Union structural
funds. There is also very active involvement in the
“My Estonia” project. According to Kalm, time is
our biggest contribution in the project.
In 2008, two major factors impacted the activity
of Eesti Telekom. Although mobile and broadband
services have been successful, the company
has been influenced by the economic
downturn as well as national and Europeanwide
regulations in the last two quarters. Regulations
generally mean that prices must be
lowered in the mobile sector and EMT is required
to oblige. “The turnover decreased but
we still managed to increase the profit and the
margins of our activity also increased, which in
turn shows sustainability. Increase in the number
of customers in mobile as well as broadband
internet has confirmed the fact that
internet is a human need,” Kalm concludes with
satisfaction.
Kalm recognises that although the cooling off
of the economy already showed serious signs in
2008, the enterprises of Telekom Grupp have
managed to adapt to the changing conditions.
What does this mean? In all three enterprises,
cost-effectiveness programs have been implemented
already since spring 2008 in order to
reconcile the costs with the benefits. In addition,
EMT and Elion have managed to preserve
very secure market shares in their business.
“Preserving the market share has always been
our goal and we have succeeded,” says the director
of the enterprise.
Kalm is looking forward to this autumn. The
man who is always optimistic now has notes of
doubt in his words and thinks that it will be in no
time soon that we will see economic recovery.
“We have definitely not reached bottom yet, the
number of jobs will decrease further and I think
and fear that there will probably really be
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