Pascal Pascal was founded in 2003 by a group of telecom executives led by Rick Murphy, an American with 25 years of B2B telecom sales experience in the US, Europe and Russia. The other founders and key executives were Russians who had worked with Murphy in previous jobs. Pascal's shareholder group included five private equity firms - the largest, at 25%, was a well-known Russian investor and the others were western European telecom-focused funds. The management team had a stake of approximately 10%. Pascal was one of the leading providers of broadband wireless services to large and mid-sized businesses in Russia with a market share of about 6% of revenues and 4% of volumes in 2011. Rostelecom, the government owned incumbent, dominated the market with a 46% share of revenues; the other large mobile operators, Vimpelcom and MTS, each had an 8% share. The large corporate segment" accounted for 60% of Pascal's 2011 revenues of US$65 million; the medium segment " came in next with 30% and small businesses" contributed 10%. Over 80% of revenues came from domestic connectivity services - Internet leased lines and virtual private networks. The rest was from voice and managed services. Pascal did not offer any international connectivity or voice services. Pascal's wireless network, built using worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMax) technology, " was present in nearly 200 cities in Russia. The company leased bandwidth from Rostelecom and others to connect all these cities on a high-speed national backbone network. In 2011, Pascal employed 1,825 people, of which about 650 were in customer-facing functions, 850 in operations and the rest in administrative functions. "BRIICS refers to the countries of Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa. "Defined as the top 200 companies in Russia, including multinational corporations with a presence in Russia. 18 Russian companies ranking from 200 to 2000. 19 About 50,000 in total. 20 WiMax is a wireless communication standard that provided up to 1 gigabit per second speeds to fixed receivers. Tata Communications: Emerging Markets Growth Strategy | 7