Moscow, Russian Federation – Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (“MTS” – NYSE: MBT), the leading telecommunications provider in Russia and the CIS, announces that it has been named as one of the BRANDZ™ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands, a ranking published by the Financial Times and Millward Brown, a leading global market research and consulting firm. MTS once again joins the ranks of the most powerful brands in the world with a value of $9.7 billion at the 72nd position. As in 2008 and 2009, MTS is the most valuable Russian brand in the ranking.

The value of the MTS brand continued to increase for the third year in a row and has grown from $8.1 billion in 2008 to $9.2 billion in 2009 to over $9.7 billion in 2010.

MTS launched its current brand in May 2006, building on its market leadership and reputation as the highest quality operator in the region. With over 102 million subscribers out of a total population of over 230 million in the markets in which it operates, MTS has the largest mobile customer base in the CIS. Subscribers trust the MTS brand as it represents high quality and offers the most innovative products. "Since the launch of the new MTS brand in 2006, we have focused on developing it to become the strongest brand in our markets to reflect our position as the leading telecommunications group in Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” commented Mikhail Gerchuk, Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of MTS. "We have since enhanced the MTS brand by bringing it to additional countries of operation and now we are focused on extending it to complementary products and services, like fixed broadband, pay TV as well as content and entertainment services. As more people are becoming MTS customers through a variety of services we offer across multiple markets, we expect our brand to continue growing in value and be recognized as among the most successful globally."

About Millward Brown’s Ranking

The BRANDZ Ranking is the only brand ranking based on primary research – it therefore reflects the perceptions of people who really count – brand users and consumers. Derived from BRANDZ database, the world's largest repository of brand equity data, the BRANDZ study has interviewed more than one million consumers globally and covers 50,000 brands worldwide. The BRANDZ Ranking is the first study to cover both business and consumer brands and to include predictive metrics of future brand performance. Market performance metrics and financial data were obtained from Datamonitor and Bloomberg respectively.