The FINANCIAL — “American businesses will surely prosper and more will come to Georgia if the Government continues to make it easier to do business in the country,” David Lee, President of American Chamber of Commerce in Georgia and General director of Magticom, one of the leading telecommunication companies in Georgia, told The FINANCIAL.
The US Ambassador in Georgia John Bass visited the mobile communications company Magticom. The main issues discussed at the meeting with Mr. Bass were the “current economic situation in Georgia and the plans of Magticom”.
According to Mr. Lee, three factors have enabled the success of recent years: opportunities in the market, low corruption, and a friendly government and regulation. “These must remain if we are to grow the economy,” he says.
“The US Embassy and AmCham are doing their best in order to increase the visibility of Georgia in the international business community,” Mr. Lee states.
The American side is going to implement various investments in Magticom. The company so far invested over USD 400 million in Georgia, and it plans to invest USD 100 million in 2009.
“In addition to the expansion of the mobile telephone network, Magticom has now completed coverage of the entire territory of Georgia with its fixed and high speed internet CDMA network,” Mr. Lee said. Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) is a channel access method utilized by various radio communication technologies.
One of the most important projects from Magticom is that the company is going to realize a cable school project in Georgia. The project goal is to connect the schools to the internet, to make sure that Georgian school children have access to the internet.
“In my opinion this is one of the most important projects underway in Georgia today,” Mr. Lee said. “We must allow our children to catch up to the children in more developed economies who have access to the educational opportunities provided through the internet.”
“Magticom has won a contract from the Government of Georgia to connect over 2,000 schools to the internet. We are working quickly to achieve this aim but we also need to lay thousands of kilometres of fibre-optic cable in the cities and between the cities to carry the internet traffic to the children and to our other customers,” Mr. Lee added.
As well as America magticom has partnerships with many other foreign countries. These countries are providing the company with state-of-the-art equipment. The company has relationships with Motorola, Cisco, HP, ECI, and Harris Networks from the USA, Ericsson and Nokia from Europe and ZTE and Huawei from China.
“Telecommunications is a truly global industry today,” Mr. Lee mentions.
The recent novelty from Magticom is that the company has released a Blackberry service last week. The Blackberry service, the Magti service, is now officially on the Blackberry website.
“In terms of new products, we have just released Blackberry and our Magtifix and Magtifix high speed internet USB Modem are selling well. All these products work in the cities and the regions and the quality is of the highest level,” Mr. Lee said.
“In the future we look to find more and more products that enable people, wherever they are, to access the internet at high speeds,” he added.
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