OREANDA-NEWS. On 05 June 2009 COMSTAR – United TeleSystems (COMSTAR-UTS, LSE: CMST), the leading integrated telecommunications operator in Russia and the CIS, announced that the company has ranked the 26th place in the rating of 100 largest Eastern European countries made up by Financial Times annual. Last year, COMSTAR-UTS Group of companies ranked the 66th place in this rating. COMSTAR-UTS has ranked the sixth place among telecommunication companies.

“We are happy to see that investors set a high value on COMSTAR-UTS, thus showing their highest level of trust in the Group of companies. This is an excellent result for a public company, – said Sergey Pridantsev, President of COMSTAR-UTS, when commenting results of the rating by Financial Times. – Last year, COMSTAR-UTS attained outstanding results despite the global and domestic economic instability. The year 2008 was the first year when the Group of companies worked in line with the Five Attack Angles strategy. COMSTAR-UTS became a national-wide and all-purpose telecommunications operator. We provide multiservice telecommunication services in 70 cities of Russia, as well as in Armenia and Ukraine. We have become the first telecommunication company to integrate innovative solutions and business approaches on the Russian telecommunication market that have allowed us to gain the lead among alternative operators. Our performance results in the first quarter of 2009 also prove that our strategy is very efficient. It is largely due to all of the above factors that we have managed to move up 40 places over the last year in the rating by Financial Times”.

The rating of 100 largest Eastern European companies has been published in Vedomosti newsletter. The article accompanying the rating states that Financial Times has made up the rating of 500 largest global companies in market capitalization and a number of regional ratings for the 13th year already. These lists show leading companies and industries as well as those that have fallen from grace of investors. For further details, please visit www.ft.com and www.vedomosti.ru.