OREANDA-NEWS. April 12, 2010. Early this morning, Vimpelcom published its 20-F form for 2009. In our first take, we focus on some additional colour on the company’s operating activities during the crisis year, reported the press-centre of VTB Capital.

Overall, the company reduced the number of staff 5.3%, which looks reasonable to us. Specifically, it cut employee numbers 3.5% in Russia, 24.8% in Ukraine, 12.5% in Kazakhstan and 10.4% in Uzbekistan. Looking at the Ukrainian numbers (the significant decrease in staff), we see that the company has probably started to prepare for the Kyivstar acquisition.

The high advances to associates figure of USD 237mn (compared with the USD 163mn last year) might represent Vimpelcom’s prepayment fee to Evroset and could possibly result in the retailer showing weaker cash flows in the future.

We note that the low capex in Russia resulted in low construction volumes. The Russian mobile network increased around 8% (2,078 base stations, including 3G) nearly in line with low traffic growth, while in other CIS countries the growth nearly stopped.

Roaming revenues decreased 30.4% in USD terms, or 11.1% in rouble terms. This is in line with management’s previous statements that roaming revenues would be weak in 2009 (they accounted for 4.8% of the company’s total revenues).

The company continues its natural hedge against its loans (which are 65% in USD), having around 63.5% (or USD 919.7mn) of its YE09 cash position in USD and just 24.9% (or USD 316.1mn) in Russian roubles. We note that the company’s USD cash position was sufficient for Vimpelcom to meet its 1Q10 debt payments of around USD 0.9bn.