Russian telecom giant Sistema entering India’s mobile phone market, big time!

Russian telecom giant Sistema, which recently acquired a controlling stake in India’s Shyam Telelink, announced that it will be launching a nation-wide mobile services by April 2009.

Sistema-Shyam is the first company among the new players to get CDMA spectrum in 13 circles and it hopes to get the frequency in remaining ones to become a pan-India operator. In addition, Sistema also announced plans to participate in the auctioning of 3G spectrum when the process starts, and ultimately become one of India’s top five players with 60 million subscribers by 2017.

At the moment, Sistema holds 51% stake in Shyam, but it plans to increase it to the maximum permissible limit of 74% in the next two months.

[Via: Economic Times]