As you know, in the first quarter, during the tragic events of January, we took unprecedented measures to support our subscribers. We took similar steps in early September, freeing residents and entrepreneurs of the Auliekol district of Kostanay region, who suffered from large-scale forest fires, from subscription fees for services. At the same time, we proclaimed 2022 the Year of Social Support for Employees, and the Company allocated significant financial resources to support and improve the well-being of its employees. Social responsibility and sustainable development of the Company have been and remain an important value and strategic priority for us. In 2023, we plan to approve the Sustainable Development Strategy, which will contribute to the further development of responsible practices in Kazakhtelecom JSC.

All of this could not but affect our financial indicators at the beginning and in the middle of the year, but at the end of the year we managed to completely level out all negative deviations and significantly improve our net profit indicator, which was also noted by the international rating agencies S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings. These respected players of the world market assessed our rating at the level «Stable» in 2022, forecasted further organic growth of proceeds and recognized the high financial stability of the Company as a guarantee of their assessments and forecasts.

As a result, today Kazakhtelecom remains the unconditional leader of the telecommunications market of Kazakhstan, providing a wide range of services and services in all segments: in fixed telephony, broadband Internet access, mobile communications, pay TV and IT-products.

All the strategic decisions made in 2022 are recorded in the Annual Report, which I am pleased to present to you. It reflects the main indicators by which the Company’s performance is assessed — financial and technical. You will also find an analysis of our activities in various market segments, as well as a progress report on the implementation of projects and tasks. I will briefly highlight a few, in my opinion, of the most significant and important ones.

As you know, in December 2022, a consortium of operators MTS LLP and Kcell JSC won the frequency auction to deploy the fifth generation communication standard. And now, according to the terms of the competition, these companies must install more than 7,000.5G base stations throughout the country by 2027, of which 486 base stations in Astana, Almaty and Shymkent will be put into operation as early as 2023.

In addition, Kazakhtelecom JSC last year signed an agreement with AzerTelecom on work on the most complex international project for the construction of a fiber-optic line that will run along the bottom of the Caspian Sea along the route «Azerbaijan — Kazakhstan». To date, a high-level design of the HLD (high-level design) of the future submarine line has already been developed, a detailed roadmap for the implementation of the project has been approved, and after the completion of the research work, the direct construction of «optics» on the bottom of the Caspian Sea will follow. The main route will run from Aktau to Azerbaijani Siazan and will be more than 340 km, a reserve channel with a length of about 330 km will be laid from the Kazakh port of Kuryk to the Buzovna point, which is not far from Baku.

I believe that the Trans-Caspian project is strategically very important for Kazakhstan, since with its implementation we will get an additional outlet to international traffic and a new channel that will allow us to ensure the transit of global traffic from Asian countries through the territory of Kazakhstan and via a submarine cable to Azerbaijan with further access to Europe through Georgia, the Black Sea and Bulgaria. In addition, the project will serve as a driver to accelerate the creation of a new digital telecommunications corridor and help to reach a higher level of development of a high-speed and secure data transmission infrastructure, will serve to strengthen trade and other ties both for the Company and the country as a whole.

In 2022, we installed additional caching servers from global content providers Akamai, Facebook, Google, Cloudflare, Netflix, Meta and were actively involved in the transfer of subscribers from outdated ADSL data transmission technology to «optics»: the first settlement whose networks were completely modernized was monotown Kurchatov. In 2023, this project will affect more than 25 thousand users in 9 cities of the republic. Also last year, we built up the network infrastructure, providing residents of multi-storey buildings with high-speed Internet using GPON technology, and residents of the private sector of cities and nearby settlements — using FWA technology, fixed wireless communications. Our plans for the next two years include the construction of more than 300 base stations to connect about 160 thousand private houses throughout the country to modern telecom services and FWA services.

In general, this year we will direct all our efforts to remain the best provider for our subscribers in all segments — and for this we have everything we need. The undoubted and competitive advantage of our Company is a developed infrastructure, which includes more than 85 thousand km of fiber-optic lines throughout the country, over 14 thousand base stations, 27 data centers and 40 thousand urban video surveillance cameras. All this allows us to provide high-quality services to more than 1.9 million subscribers in the broadband access sector, over 14.5 million in the mobile communications segment and serve 930.7 thousand pay TV connection points.

In conclusion, I want to express my sincere gratitude to all members of the Board of Directors, the Management Board and all employees of the Company for their professionalism, fruitful and teamwork, conscientiousness and dedication.