MTC in talks on Madagascar telecoms deal

Kuwait's Mobile Telecommunications Company (MTC) is in talks to buy a majority stake in a mobile phone services provider in Madagascar, the fast-expanding company said on Tuesday.

"The company is conducting negotiations in this regard but a final agreement has not been reached yet," MTC said in a statement on the Kuwait bourse Web site.

In Madagascar, an official with Madacom said MTC is bidding for the telecom concern that is majority-owned by Hong Kong- based Distacom. But the official, who did not want to be identified, gave no details on size of bid or the size of stake involved.

"It's almost done," the Madacom official told Reuters in Madagascar's capital Antananarivo.

"There's still negotiations but maybe in the next few days we'll have results. It will be official in the next few weeks."

Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas that MTC was in talks to buy a majority stake in an unidentified Madagascan mobile phone firm which it said had 250,000 subscribers.

MTC, which has more than 12 million customers in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and 13 countries in Africa, also said on November 30 it was in advanced talks to buy a mobile operation in Sudan.

MTC, the largest of two mobile telecom providers in Kuwait, is one of several fast-expanding companies from the energy-rich Gulf region and has operations in 13 sub-Saharan African countries through its Dutch-based subsidiary Celtel.

On Monday, MTC said it had raised 666.25 million dinars ($2.3 billion) in a rights issue to help fund an aggressive expansion campaign -- the largest capital raising in Kuwait's bourse history.

Al-Qabas quoted MTC sources as saying the company was also eyeing other African nations such as Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and Egypt. The sources said Nigeria, which has a population of 150 million with a mobile phone penetration rate of less than 10 percent, offers more than one opportunity.

"MTC strives to put Celtel in the No.1 spot in Africa soon from No.3 (currently)," MTC Chairman Asaad al-Banwan said.

MTC did not name either of the companies it is talks with in Madagascar or Sudan, although one newspaper report said it was in talks to buy the cellular subsidiary of Sudan Telecom in a $1.5 billion deal.

MTC said it will inform the bourse of any developments regarding the Madagascar acquisition.

In a separate statement, MTC also said it had bid for Turkey's second-largest wireless company, Telsim, along with six other telecoms firms. The bids are due to be made public December 13.-Reuters

Kuwait City

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IMF Executive Board Discusses the First Assessment of Eligible Countries under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative

On December 21, 2005 the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established the list of countries that qualify for debt relief from the Fund under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). Debt relief delivery, which could start as soon as January 3, 2005, is now conditional on getting the consents of all the contributors to the Subsidy Account of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) Trust, whose contributions help finance the Initiative. The MDRI will deliver debt relief from the Fund to qualifying members countries with an annual per capita income at or below US$380, and to countries above the threshold that have reached the completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The implementation of the MDRI will reduce the external debt burden of a number of the world's poorest countries and will provide additional resources to help them reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Background The Executive Board appro...
Read more

Oil’s chaotic collapse deepens; stocks drop worldwide

Image
NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices crumpled even further Tuesday, and U.S. stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as worries swept markets worldwide about the economic carnage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The market’s spotlight was again on oil, where prices have plummeted because very few people are flying or driving, and factories have shut amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Global demand is set to drop to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. At the same time, oil producers can’t slow their production fast enough, and all the extra crude means storage tanks are quickly running out of room. The cost for a barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June plunged 43% to $11.57. That’s the part of the market that oil traders are focused on and trading most actively. For oil to be delivered next month, which is when storage tanks could top out, the cost of a barrel stood at $10.01. A day earlier, it fell below zero for the first time, meaning traders paid others to take oil off their hand...
Read more

Mapping Extreme Poverty Around the World A new report from the

Image
A new report from the  World Bank  just landed, finding that a record low of 10% of humanity now live in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2013. But poverty rates aren’t anywhere close to equal between continents or even countries, as our new series of maps clearly demonstrates. The World Bank provides an in-depth explanation for its methodology, which you can find in Appendix A of the full report  here . We focused on the percentage of people in each country living below what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty, or $1.90/day. We’ll let the researchers defend this definition on their own, but there is one caveat to keep in mind. It can be extraordinarily difficult to collect reliable data from so many countries on a regular basis, and in fact we used the latest year in which numbers were available whenever possible. For example, in some of these maps we compare 2011 figures against 2015. In short, our maps provide the clearest possible apples-to-apples compa...
Read more