Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile operator, said it boosted investments by 63.1% year-on-year in the second quarter of the year to rebuild and upgrade the country's war-damaged telecommunications network.
The company, which has 23 million mobile subscribers, said it invested UAH 2.275 billion ($55 million) in the second quarter in "the reconstruction of the telecom infrastructure, the development of new technologies in Ukraine, and the strengthening of the energy stability of communication networks."
In that period, the company extended high-speed mobile internet to 133 additional settlements in Q2, bringing the total to 295, according to a media statement.
At the same time, revenue rose 9.5% on year in local-currency terms to UAH 9.425 billion and 0.4% in US dollar terms to $236 million, Kyivstar owner VEON said.
Kyivstar also said that, as of the end of June, it had 115,000 new batteries and 2,300 generators that can power its base stations for at least four hours continuously to keep the network running during blackouts. It plans to buy another 848 industrial generators and 61,700 batteries to prepare for the coming cold season.
The number of high-speed mobile internet users, meanwhile, rose 7.9% from Q2 of last year to 16.9 million subscribers even as the subscriber base shrank 2.8% due to people leaving the country during the war and Russian occupation of some settlements, it said.
Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, the company has invested more than UAH 15.6 billion in its Ukrainian infrastructure, according to the statement.
