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Bharti Airtel has made a $10.7 billion bid for Zain’s 14 African mobile businesses excluding Morocco and Sudan, as part of its efforts to grow outside of India. In an official company statement, Bharti said that it had entered into “exclusive discussions with Zain” that will last until March 25th, but gave no guarantees that a deal would be made. Bharti’s shareholders, however, don’t seem confident the company will be able to monetize the potential acquisition properly, thus the carrier’s share prices fell as a response to the news.
It’s important to add that India’s largest mobile operator have tried to enter the African market in the past. It has twice entered into merger talks with the Johannesburg-based MTN but discussions led nowhere.
Zain on its end has recently got a new CEO after failing to make money out of its fast-growing yet loss-making African networks, which BTW account for over 60% of all Zain customers.
In addition to Bharti, France’s Vivendi and UK’s Vodafone have also been rumored as potential buyers of Zain’s African businesses.
And for the record, Bharti keeps adding over 8 million new connections per quarter in India, but is not making that much money due to looming price wars in the country.
[Via: MobileBusinessBriefing]
About The Author
Dusan Belic
Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis.
