Bangladesh operator to be bought by Indian telco Bharti Airtel
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Bangladesh’s fourth largest mobile phone operator Warid is set to sell 70% stake in its company from its Abu Dhabi-based owners and regulators to one of the India’s leading telco Bharti Airtel. An approval
from the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission for the sale has been sought by the Dhabi Group, which fully owns Warid.
With the latest move, Airtel becomes the largest foreign operator to make inroads into Bangladesh mobile phone market. According to BTRC chairman Zia Ahmed, Bharti initially intended to invest 300 million dollars.
Warid was launched in 2007 and had three million subscribers at the end of October. The subscription is predicted to cross 100 million marks by 2015 by the industry experts.
Last year Japan’s NTT DoCoMo Inc bought 30 percent stake in operator AKTEL. Earlier, in the year 2004, Egyptian Orascom took over Sheba and in 2005 Singapore based Singtel bought 45 percent stake in Bangladesh Telecom.
Etisalat mulling over Iraq’s telecom option, to decide by year en
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The second-largest Arab telecom operator by market value, Emirates Telecommunications Corp, or Etisalat said that it will decide whether to bid for a licence or buy a stake in a local player in Iraq, by the end of 2009.
The company is holding talks with Korek Telecom of Iraq, to acquire 51% stake in the company. Etisalat is also planning to bid for fourth mobile telecom license in Iraq after the government announced plans earlier this year to launch a new auction.
Etisalat is waiting to hear from the Libyan authorities about the company’s bid for a license in the region besides, bidding for third mobile license to be launched by the Syrian government.
The company is also keeping a close eye on Iran’s situation where the Abu Dhabi-based company along with a consortium won an international tender for Iran’s third mobile phone license in 2009. However, the deal later fell through.
BlackBerry Mobily-ised
Push e-mail vendor Blackberry will launch a service for enterprise customers in Saudi Arabia through mobile operator Mobily this month, its channel partner Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS) announced last week.
The mobile systems integrator said in a press conference last week that pilot projects were already underway with eight of the Kingdom’s biggest corporations – although it declined to name any of them.
Mobily will be offering the Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the BlackBerry 8700 handset to corporate customers in the Kingdom this month and then to consumers before the end of the year.
The Saudi launch follows the introduction of BlackBerry to the UAE in May and EMS said there would be a number of other tie-ups with other Middle East operators over the coming months.
“There are soon to be many other operators [launching BlackBerry] in the region,” claimed William Rom, chief operating officer of EMS.
As well as the news about its deal with Mobily, EMS also unveiled a number of the top corporate customers it has signed up in the UAE since launching around five months ago.
Its corporate customers include Emirates Bank, National Bank of Dubai (NBD), Emirates Group, Emaar, Dubai Aluminium, Dubai International Financial Exchange (DIFX), Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB).
Source- http://www.itp.net/news
Technorati : Middle East, Mobile, RIM
Ice Rocket : Middle East, Mobile, RIM
