Telia Lietuva data center growth will be driven by development instead of acquisition

Telia Lietuva, the largest telecommunications and IT service provider in Lithuania, has withdrawn its application for a concentration permit submitted to the Competition Council in February 2018 relating to the planned acquisition of UAB Duomenų Logistikos Centas (DLC) from UAB Lietuvos Energija and AB Litgrid. The transaction for the acquisition of DLC signed in August of 2017 will not be continued, and the funds allocated for the acquisition will be directed to the development of the core business of the company.

Parties to the original acquisition agreement – namely, Telia Lietuva, Lietuvs Energija and Litgrid – have now signed a termination agreement. According to the preliminary market assessment of the Competition Council, after the concentration Telia Lietuva’s share in the market of data centres would increase significantly, thus the company would have to dispose of a part of its own or the acquired company’s activities to a third party.

“Having evaluated the intermediate market assessment indications, we see that we may not be able to achieve the scope of the transaction we would have liked to see. As it is not advisable to use investment resources for a substandard outcome, we prefer to withdraw our application. However, we respect the indications of the competition supervisory authority and are not planning to contest them”, says Kęstutis Šliužas, the CEO of Telia Lietuva.

According to him, synergies in this area are possible within Telia Group, for example, by using the capacity of the open data and cloud computing centre which was opened in Finland at the beginning of June, which will be the second largest centre in the Nordic countries and one of the most modern ones in Europe.

Telia currently owns 8 data centres in Lithuania and is the largest provider of IT infrastructure services in Lithuania. Two years ago, Telia Lietuva opened a new data center in Vilnius that is certified according to TIER III security standards. It is one out of just two of such security level data centers in Lithuania and the sixth in the Baltic Sea region.

Person authorised to provide additional information is Audrius Stasiulaitis, Spokesperson, tel. +370 5 236 7019, e-mail: [email protected]