Golden Telecom history

1983: San Francisco/Moscow Teleport, Inc. is set up as a nonprofit company.

1986: The company is incorporated as Global TeleSystems, Inc., a for-profit corporation.

Global TeleSystems set up two of its major ventures in 1990.

In April Golden Telecom bought a 51 percent share in KIS (Commercial Information Systems), an ISP that had been active in Nizhny Novgorod since 1992.

The company TeleRoss was established in 1994 to provide domestic long-distance services via a satellite network.

Global TeleSystems reached the city of Nizhny Novgorod in 1996 when it set up a joint venture with Svyazinform Nizhny Region.

By the end of 1997, Global TeleSystems had 3,160 dial-up Internet subscribers and 50 points of presence across Russia that could be used to access the Russia On-Line service that had been developed by the Sovam Teleport subsidiary.

Golden Telecom's IPO, the first by a Russian company since the financial crisis in August 1998, was not viewed as a success.

Since the fall of 2000, Golden Telecom's future had been uncertain, as its United States-based majority shareholder Global TeleSystems had indicated that it wished to get rid of its Russian assets and focus on Western Europe.

Golden Telecom had a 58 percent stake in the new entity, formed when TeleRoss Nizhny Novgorod and the Internet company KIS were merged into Agentstvo Delovoi Svyazi (ADS). Golden Telecom had acquired ADS, which operated a network infrastructure in Nizhny Novgorod, in September 2001.