Company briefs - 2010-10-21

In the first ninth months of 2010, Latvia’s national airline airBaltic, transported 6,970 tons of cargo, which is 21 percent more than in the same period last year. This being twice as much as before the restructuring of the firm and the intensive development of its transit business, the business portal Nozare.lv was told by airBaltic spokesman Janis Vanags. Last year the firm’s cargo volumes grew by 87 percent compared to 2008. Most of the airline’s cargo shipments are transported from Western countries in an eastward direction.  More detailed statistics indicate that 40 percent of the total transported volume is postal cargo. The airline’s services are used to transport goods with high added value, for example medicines and electronics. The proportion of transit cargo constitutes 70 percent of the total amount.

The era of payphones ends in Estonia on December 1, Eesti Paevaleht Online reports. AS Elion, which owns the payphones that haven’t yet been dismantled, withdraws payphone cards from sale on October 15. The last call from a payphone can be made on November 30. “We will start dismantling payphones on December 1. We are ready to give them for example to artists if they want to make installations of payphones for artistic purposes,” said Elion’s head of PR Lilian Nolvak. “The payphone business is loss-making and unpopular among clients. The number of calls fell by nearly 30 times from 2004,” she added. In 1997, when the installation of modern payphones using chip cards was completed, there were 3,000 of them in Estonia. By now there are just about 550, most of them in Tallinn. While in 2004 still 6 million minutes worth of calls were made from payphones, now it is 30 times smaller due to the wide spread of cell phones. The annual sales volume of payphone calling cards has fallen by 20 times since 2004.

The Russian wood-processing company Sveza has offered to purchase the shares of Latvijas Finieris by purchasing each available share for 10,000 lats (14,200 euros). This way Sveza would be able to purchase Latvijas Finieris for approximately 4 million lats. The largest shareholder of Sveza is Alexei Mordashov who owns 83 percent of Severstal.
The Authorities of Latvijas Finieris have announced that they are not interested in the sale of the company.