Detail of press release from 1. 10. 2008

Prague, October 1, 2008 – GTS Novera, the nationwide telecommunication operator, released its interim financial results. GTS Novera's revenues generated from sales of telecommunication services amounted to CZK 2.65 billion in H1/2008. The EBITDA indicator totaled CZK 385 million. These results reflect the company business plan for 2008 that expects stable revenues and an EBITDA level along with an emerging investments increase due to the infrastructure modernization that will be completed in 2009.

The company's investments to fixed assets totaled CZK 242 million in the first half of 2008, 2 % higher than in 2007. The investments were primarily to modernize the backbone network, increase the number of access points and develop the local loop as well as to the initial work on a planned development of next generation network and products in 2009.

Revenues in H1/2008 are lowered by 7 per cent and EBITDA went down by 16 per cent in year-to-year comparison. This inconsistency is primarily caused by the extraordinary figures in H1/2007 that resulted from direct synergy effects after the merger and transformation process finalization in 2007. These year´s interim results are fully in line with company plan of more or less stable revenue and EBITDA level for the whole 2008 and the company performs even better than planned.

„The transformation that brought many synergy effects is definitely over and now we’re looking to day-to-day business focusing on corporate customers and launching new data and VoIP services as the traditional Czech fixed telecommunication market experiences a permanent price fall. Despite this, we successfully fulfilled our 2008 plans and we do not expect anything different by the end of this year,” said Stuart Evers, Chief Executive Office of GTS Novera and added: “We are heading to the next year with the prospect of launching NGN products and having finalized the fixed-mobile converged offer for corporate customers. We will also continue focusing on the overall company business efficiency and moving forward with the unifying process within the GTS CE group.”

Apart from the expected investment in the network upgrade and expansion in order to launch NGN and VoIP services, GTS Novera is looking at ICT solutions development and is close to concluding negotiations with mobile competitors in order to come up with the converged fixed-mobile offers for corporate and SME customers in 2009. GTS Novera also boosted its sales activities by organization re-alignment. The Chief Sales Officer position was reintroduced to the organization structure when Petr Možíš, director of GTS Novera´s corporate segment for many years, took over this post at the beginning of September. As the largest member of GTS CE, a leading CEE fixed-line telecommunication operator, GTS Novera is also involved in the strong unifying process that will result in closer cooperation within the group subsidiaries and in performance of GTS CE as a fully unified operator on the regional level.

On GTS Novera

GTS Novera is a nationwide telecommunication operator providing a comprehensive portfolio of voice, data and Internet service with a quality level guaranteed. The company was established in 2005 upon a merger of two leading alternative telecommunication operators, namely GTS CZECH and Aliatel. In 2006 it succeeded in completing an acquisition of additional three alternative telecommunication operators that had been doing business on the Czech telecommunication market, namely Contactel, Telenor Networks and Nextra. The company is a part of a powerful international telecommunication group GTS Central European Holding B.V., which is a leading provider of telecommunication services within the Central European region. The current headcount is about 500.

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Lucie Řeřichová

Ondřej Micka

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