SARAJEVO (Bosnia and Herzegovina), December 6 (SeeNews) – Slovenian telecoms solutions provider Iskratel said on Thursday it had signed a 1.1 million euro ($1.6 million) contract with Bosnia's biggest telco, state-controlled BH Telecom.
The contract is for the upgrade of BH Telecom’s telecommunication network in the area of the northern towns of Srebrenik and Brcko and for the expansion of the communication capacity in the area of Zenica in central Bosnia, Iskratel said in a statement.
Iskratel also plans to take part in a tender for the further upgrade of the telecommunication network in Bosnia, worth 2.5 million euro. The tender is expected to be called next year, Iskratel said without elaborating.
BH Telecom is the largest of the three fixed-line telecoms operating in war-divided Bosnia which comprises a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic. The company is based in Bosnia's capital Sarajevo and has customers mainly in the Federation.
BH Telecom’s (www.bhtelecom.ba) first-half net profit rose 8.4% year-on-year to 58.23 million marka ($43.64 million/29.94 million euro). It had total assets of 1.272 billion marka at the end of June, up from 1.239 billion marka at the end of 2006.
The other two Bosnian telecoms are HT Mostar, which is active in the Federation, and Telekom Srpske which operates in the Serb Republic. All three Bosnian telecoms have wireless units.
The Federation government has said it would try to draft a plan for the sale of its majority stakes in BH Telecom and HT Mostar. It owns 90% of the former and 50.103% of the latter company. Deutsche Telekom is a strategic partner of the government in HT Mostar with a 39.1% stake it owns via its Croatian unit, T-HT.
In December, Bosnia's Serb Republic sold a 65% stake in Telekom Srpske to Serbia's state-controlled Telekom Srbija for 646 million euro.
(1 euro=1.95583 Bosnian marka)