3 Afghan operators fined by Afghan regulator
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The quality of communications services offered by several mobile companies was found to be below reasonable level in the third and fourth quarter by the Afghanistan Telecom Regulatory Authority (Atra).
Services of three mobile operators of Afghanistan namely Afghan Wireless Communications, MTN and Etisalat, were found to below the standards required by their license and hence being fined for the low quality output.
A fine of AFN 1.5 million on Etisalat has been imposed by the Atra while Afghan Wireless Communications was fined AFN 3.5 million and AFN 5 million has been asked by MTN.
Is UK heading towards merger era?
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: European Union has given its blessing to the most talked about deal of the season and the celebration will soon begin with the consummation of the proposed merger of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK. The telecom sector of UK is vital and highly competitive and the main players have always and loudly protested their support of the benefits of competition.
But with the finalization of the proposed merger, the big five have come down to big four. The current market leader in UK, O2 will be pushed a place down the hierarchy. Vodafone will go further down the order and will be casting around for some way to bolster its fortunes. All these mobile operators will try to cope up with the new and a powerful competition in the form of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK merger and by “competition” they all will mean merging themselves.
Though O2 will not be allowed to merge with Vodafone as the regulators in the UK and in Europe would not allow it too but the two can share their networks on a full fledged way.
The merger is paving the way towards a new trend of merger and collaboration of the entities that have control of two huge networks running the sector by themselves. The new trend will also provide access and services to a variety of MVNOs.
Until and unless a line is drawn by the regulator between the big two, the end user will be disadvantaged by the consolidation.
Bharti Airtel to raise $7b in loan (India)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: In order to finance the purchase of some of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Co. assets, Indian telco Bharti Airtel is looking to raise $7 billion via a six-year U.S. dollar loan with an average maturity of 4.75 years.
Another $2 billion to $3 billion will also be raised India’s largest mobile phone operator by subscribers via a rupee loan. The planned $7 billion loan is aimed to be priced at 225 basis points by Bharti Airtel above the London interbank offered rate.
According to the people familiar with the matter, Bharti Airtel is gunning for a very tight rate and it is still not sure where it will settle but the pricing will be far tighter than initial discussions. It was earlier revealed that initial discussions for funding began at around 300 basis points above Libor for a seven-year dollar loan.
The comments are pouring as Bharti Airtel in its bid to enter a fast-growing overseas market will commence its exclusive talks until March 25 to buy the African assets of Zain.
Bharti regains losses as investors revisit Zain deal (India)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Within two days of the announcement that Bharti Airtel and Zain will enter into exclusive talks for Zain’s African assets, Bharti lost $3.6 billion in market capitalisation.
However, an improvement in the investor’s sentiments has been noticed since then, primarily after Bharti’s conference call with analysts in end-February on the Zain acquisition. The main concern was the fact that the valuation of the deal at 11.6 times estimated 2009 EBITDA was far too high.
In its clarification, the company said that the $1.7 billion debt component in Zain Africa’s enterprise value is inclusive of the share attributable to minority shareholders. The company has also indicated that tax rates in Africa are relatively lower, which justifies some premium in the valuation. Besides, the capital infusion of $9 billion of Zain till date makes the valuation of $10.7 billion look reasonable. The fact that Zain’s margin is lower than Bharti’s margin also leaves room for cost containment.
$4 billion would be used by Zain Africa’s holding company to retire debt on its books with the interest burden of $4 billion debt already reflected in Zain Africa’s financials, hence, the incremental interest burden would only be on $5 billion of debt.
All the factors have contributed well to improve the sentiments of the investors and has helped Bharti regained almost two-thirds of those losses.
Telefonica purchase of ETB raises questions (Colombia)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Several market implications might arise with the potential purchase of Colombian telecoms operator ETB by Telefonica as ETB also owns 25% of mobile operator Tigo.
Tigo which is controlled by Luxembourg-based mobile group Millicom International Cellular had 4.19 million subscribers at the end of the year while Telefonica operating under the Movistar brand had 8.96 million subscribers at the end of 2009. When combined, the total subscriber base of the company will become 13.2 million, making it a distant second from America Movil’s Comcel, which ended the year with 28.8 million subscribers.
The merger will also result into four million fixed line subscribers and 1 million internet customers of Telefonica. Telefonica might also sell its stake in Tigo after which the other two shareholders, UNE-EPM with a 25% stake and Millicom with 50%, would have the right of first refusal.
EUR700 million (USD962 million) would be invested by Telefonica to acquire a controlling stake in ETB. 86.59% of ETB is currently controlled by the Bogota municipality and minority shareholders have the remainder. In order to improve its situation in the highly competitive telecom market, a partner is needed by ETB. The telco plans to sell new shares, equivalent to a 36.6% stake.
Qatar Telecom & Tata partnership confirmed
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The partnership between India’s Tata Communications and Qatar Telecom (Qtel) has been confirmed by both the companies. The deal for the construction of the Tata Global Network (TGN) Gulf Project will see Qtel establish a landing station for the regional undersea network.
The main aim of the project is the connection of the world’s major business hubs and city centers with the Gulf region.
Besides providing the foundations for next generation communications technology, the new network will also improve connectivity. Bahrain Internet Exchange consortium, Nawras of Oman, Mobily of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates are the other regional partners in the project.
Deployment of an extended portfolio of advanced telecommunications services will also be supported by the development of the cable project, scheduled to be completed by 2011. The services will include- Global Ethernet, MPLS-based VPN and Global Telepresence.
Chile’s antitrust tribunal fines Telefonica with USD4.4m
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The ruling of Chile’s antitrust tribunal TDLC has gone in favor of Chilean IP telephony enabler RedVoiss’ and has fined telecom operator Telefonica with USD4.4 million. The company had filed a complaint against Telefonica Chile alleging that it has participated in unfair pricing.
As per the finding, clients are required by Telefonica to contract bundled services. The price for these packaged services is significantly lower if they were to be contracted on their own.
According to RedVoiss CEO Alberto Mordojovich, after two and a half years of hard work with the TDLC… this decision will allow for the sale of naked broadband and he also hoped that the decision will mean a lowering of internet access prices for many Chilean families and companies
Qatar Telecom reports increase in turnover
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Consolidated group financial and operational results for 2009 has been posted by Qatar Telecom in which 20.5% increase in the net profit attributable to shareholders has been revealed, going up from up from QAR2.3 billion in 2008 to QAR2.8 billion (USD765 million) in the full-year. The company showed 15.1 percent increase in the EBITDA going up to QAR 11.3 billion.
The consolidated customer base of the group stood at 60.5 million at December 31, 2009. Entry of Qtel’s first mobile competitor, Vodafone Qatar affected the domestic EBITDA which fell to QAR3.3 billion.
The Indonesian unit of the company, Indosat’s subscriber base at end-December 2009 stood at 33.7 million, down from 37.0 million a year earlier. Removal of a significant proportion of the lower-value, calling card type behavior subscribers’ from its base over the twelve-month period has been cited as reason behind this decrease.
The total active subscribers of Asiacell increased by 20.4% during 2009 as a result of which the year closed at 7.35 million, revenue increased by 40.4% to QAR4.0 billion and EBITDA increased by 43.9% to QAR2.2 billion.
Google develops NDK r3- An enhanced OpenGL support
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Android Native Development Kit revision 3 (NDK r3) has been released by Google providing expanded capabilities to Android developers. Enhanced support for OpenGL ES 2.0 is the most interesting characteristics for the end user which will offer improved graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs.
Devices running Android 1.5 and higher is the target of the new NDK r3, Android 2.0 and higher devices, like the Motorola Droid or the Google Nexus One will be supported by the enhanced OpenGL.
Besides, refreshed binaries in line with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.4.0 will also be offered by the new Android NDK r3. According to Google, the new Android Native Development Kit revision 3 will generate more compact and efficient machine code.
Vodafone UK remains silent on job cuts
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Plans for around 500 job losses in the UK unit of Vodafone have been reported as a part of a stepped up cost-cutting programme. The network’s headquarters in Newbury has the most predominant chances to expect this job cut.
However, any such claims has been dismissed as “highly speculative” by the Vodafone spokeswoman. 500 redundancies in the UK were announced by the company last year as part of an earlier £1 billion cost cutting exercise. Since then, the deadline for achieving the cuts has been brought forward besides doubling the target to £2 billion.
According to the media reports, the problem Vodafone have got is that it is so bloated, it has tons of people and they have to cut – it is absolutely essential.
