For someone overseeing more than $13bn of telecoms assets, Alexey Reznikovich does not seem to have much time for the industry.

Or at least, that is, for the parts of the telecoms industry stuck in the past — which form the majority in his view — and that are being disrupted by technology groups and so face an uncertain future.

Mr Reznikovich, runs LetterOne Technology, the newly named holding group for the 48 per cent stake in VimpelCom and 13 per cent share of Turkcell controlled by Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman and his Russian partners.

VimpelCom is not spared in his assessment of the sector. The company — which serves 220m customers across 14 countries such as Russia, Italy, Ukraine, Bangladesh and Pakistan — needs a “complete revamp”, says Mr Reznikovich.

He sees an opportunity to substantially increase the company’s value by stripping as much as two-thirds off the costs of running the business by moving operations to a more digital platform.

Mr Reznikovich points out some of the absurdities of the old-fashioned telecoms business. “We have 10,000 tariffs in Russia,” he says, shaking his head at the expense of managing such complex arrangements. “It needs a complete revamp of the whole thing. That’s the only way to do it.”

Mr Fridman and his partners battled Telenor to become the largest shareholder in VimpelCom more than two years ago. Telenor still owns 43 per cent of the listed Amsterdam-headquartered group compared with the 48 per cent controlled by LetterOne.

In five years, Mr Reznikovich says, VimpelCom could have scaled back its workforce from 60,000 to as low as 10,000, with a fourfold cut in IT spending.

Financial Times