After moving into Kyiv due to the Crimea annexation, the company claims the MTS brand in Ukraine, as LIGABusinessInform informs.
As turned out, the Russian company “Mobile TeleSystems” along with affiliated company Vodafone Ukraine has recently won the first-instance court case against LLC MTS Kyiv. LLC MTS was founded in the Crimea as far back as 2001. The company insists that “Mobile TeleSystems” started using its brand in Ukraine much later, as far back as 2007. The mobile operator was previously called UMC. It is known that the company’s website remained disabled up to May 2015, and then it had the same content for almost a year.
The State Intellectual Property Service made a premature cancellation of the trademark LLC MTS in Ukraine for the category 35 of goods and services. However, the history of the above companies’ conflict is very long. In 2013, the namesake company tried to establish to the satisfaction of the court that the operator violated its rights by using its brand in Ukraine. But even then “Mobile TeleSystems” won the lawsuit.
October 13, the Cabinet of Ministers filed a request to the court in order to become a third party in the trial. But the court disallowed the Cabinet’s request, making it clear that those actions would possible affect the government authority’s rights and duties. October 17, the Cabinet of Ministers supported LLC MTS, requesting to dismiss the claim of “Mobile Telesystems”. Its explanations were not made public.
Olga Ustinova, CEO at Vodafone Ukraine, stated that by the end of the first quarter of coming year – at the beginning of the second quarter, the company was about to remove definitely the MTS brand from the Ukrainian market. And until then, all the cellular operator’s stores would be rebranded.
In the autumn of 2015, the Russian MTS Group signed an agreement on using Vodafone brand in Ukraine, but MTS-Ukraine would remain under the MTS’s control.
