The logo, a white egg on a color background, will be used by Sistema's telecommunications assets including Mobile TeleSystems, or MTS, Eastern Europe's No. 1 mobile phone company, Sistema Telecom said Wednesday at a news conference in Moscow.
MTS is working to combat slower growth and increased competition from VimpelCom and MegaFon. Last year, its net income rose 14 percent to $1.13 billion, the slowest pace since at least 2000, prompting CEO Vasily Sidorov to step down. Subscriptions grew 0.8 percent in March, less than both MegaFon and VimpelCom.
"Our ambitious task is to become a leading group of a national scale that will provide integrated telecommunications services,'' Sistema Telecom CEO Sergei Shchebetov said.
The rebranding campaign will cost about $4 million and was developed by Wolff Olins, a brand consultancy company owned by Omnicom Group, the world's largest owner of advertising agencies, Sistema Telecom said.
Sistema's new brand also covers the company's units Comstar United Telesystems, which offers voice, data and Internet, pay-TV and other services to corporate and residential subscribers, and Moscow City Telephone Network, or MGTS, the dominant fixed-line phone company in the Russian capital.
? Wolff Olins also works with the second-largest phone operator, VimpelCom, whose BeeLine brand has a striped yellow and black logo that is displayed on billboards around Moscow.
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