Preface
We bring to your attention the next integrated report of Kazakhtelecom JSC for the past 2022, which is the most detailed overview of the financial and economic activities of the Company, reflecting its real state.
This document confirms that, despite the large amount of capital expenditures, the country’s largest telecom operator maintained a comfortable liquidity level last year, and its revenue reached a fairly positive level. Recall that in the first quarter of 2022, during the tragic January events, the country’s largest telecom operator took unprecedented measures to support subscribers. Also, from the beginning of September 2022 until the end of last year, Kazakhtelecom JSC exempted residents and entrepreneurs of the Auliekol district of the Kostanay region, who suffered from large-scale forest fires, from the subscription fee. In addition, debts and penalties due to individuals and businesses in the region were written off, which did not prevent the Group from finishing the year with a positive financial result.
As before, Kazakhtelecom JSC retained its status as the undisputed leader of the telecommunications market in Kazakhstan, providing a wide range of services in all segments of the domestic telecommunications market: in the field of fixed telephony, broadband Internet access, mobile communications, pay TV and IT products. At the same time, the developed and powerful infrastructure, which includes more than 85 thousand km of fiber-optic lines throughout the country, over 14 thousand base stations, 27 data processing centers and 40 thousand urban video surveillance cameras, remains an undoubted and competitive advantage of the Company. This infrastructure allows the Group of Companies 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.
At the end of 2022, these factors were the basis for the rating of the Company at the level “Stable” by the
reputable international agencies S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings. They also forecasted in their report further
organic growth of the Group’s revenues due to the existing infrastructure and strong market positions. The portfolio
of projects that are strategically important not only for the Company itself, but for the whole country as a whole,
was another confirmation of Kazakhtelecom JSC’s sustainability and the possibility of successful evolutionary
development of the whole Group.
First of all, it is deployment of the network of the fifth generation communication standard in the country: over 7
thousand base stations of 5G across Kazakhstan will be installed by the Group of companies of Kazakhtelecom JSC
within the next five years, and some of them will be put into operation in three megalopolises as early as this
year. Another achievement in 2022 was the signing of an agreement with a partner from Azerbaijan on joint
implementation of the most complex international project on construction of a fiber-optic line on the bottom of the
Caspian Sea along the route “Azerbaijan — Kazakhstan”. Implementation of this project will give the country
additional access to international data traffic and create a new channel to ensure the transit of global traffic
from Asian countries through Kazakhstan to Europe.
The Company’s large and significant projects also include network deduplication; modernization and construction of
“last mile” lines both in the city and in rural areas; development of FWA technology — fixed wireless communication;
and installation of additional caching servers of global content providers Akamai, Facebook, Google, Cloudflare,
Netflix and Meta. In addition, the country’s largest telecom operator took measures to improve the performance of
Instagram (including IGTV/Reels), WhatsApp, Facebook services: due to localization of traffic on its own cached
servers, Kazakhtelecom JSC managed to significantly reduce response delays.
Today, the Group is directly involved in digitalization of the country: it actively develops digital services and
helps industrial and commercial enterprises, local and central executive bodies to digitize. Several years ago,
Kazakhtelecom JSC started to widely use big data in its work — and over this time it has created a number of its own
tools in this segment that are already being used by its partners across Kazakhstan. The main result of the
Company’s activity is that today about 99% of the country’s population is able to use all modern digital
technologies and services.
This result was achieved by implementing the strategy that is focused on preserving leading positions in all market
segments and on maximum use of synergy opportunities within the Group, including mobile operators — Mobile
Telecom-Services LLP and Kcell JSC. This year Kazakhtelecom JSC intends to continue its work in all these directions
using, among other things, the financial and technical basis laid down a year earlier.