Telia Company is set to sell its 19 percent equity stake in MegaFon, a leading telecom operator in Russia, to Gazprombank as part of its strategy to focus on the Nordics and Baltics.

Telia Company is one of the founders of MegaFon.

“After commencing our exit from MegaFon by placing 6.2 percent of our holding on the open stock market, this divestment now puts an end to Telia Company’s ownership in MegaFon in accordance with our strategy to focus on the Nordics and Baltics,” said Johan Dennelind, president and CEO of Telia Company.

Telia Company sells its 19 percent holding in MegaFon at a price of RUB 514 per share, raising gross proceeds of RUB 60.4 billion or SEK 8.6 billion or $1.02 billion with pro forma positive effect on net debt to EBITDA by approximately 0.3x.

BofA Merrill Lynch, CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley have assisted Telia Company in this transaction where CitiGroup has been the leading bank. White & Case and Houthoff have assisted as legal advisors.

MegaFon posted revenue of RUB 89,689 million (+13.9 percent), OIBDA of RUB 34,236 million (+15.8 percent) with OIBDA margin of 38.2 percent (37.5 percent), net profit of RUB 5,629 million (–22.2 percent) and CAPEX of RUB 13,772 million (+6.8 percent) in in Q2 2017.

MegaFon has recently showcased the capabilities of Gigabit LTE on a commercial network achieving peak data download speed of 979 Mbps. MegaFon used Nokia Air Scale system module and Sony’ Xperia XZ Premium, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Mobile Platform with X16 LTE for the demonstration.

MegaFon and VEON, a global provider of telecommunications and digital services serving more than 235 million customers, have agreed to end their Euroset joint venture.

MegaFon appointed Gevork Vermishyan as executive director with responsibilities for managing the operations, control of implementation of strategy, supervision of subsidiaries and affiliated entities of MegaFon.

MegaFon CEO Sergey Soldatenkov will focus on the execution of large-scale infrastructure projects, and interaction with the government and major corporate clients.