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Bharti- MTN talks yet to be concluded
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 05 August 2008, 19:30 IST
New Delhi: Further effort to have a tie-up between Bharti Airtel, one among the major mobile operators in India, and MTN, a South African telecom company, seems to be more complex as Bharatis Chairman made it clear that they have not revived the tie-up talks.
Bharati has been trying to build a partnership with MTN. In May 2008, they decided to withdraw from the proposed plan because of they were not willing to go with the ownership pattern put forwarded by MTN. They believed that structure would make Bharati a subsidiary of MTN.
Sunil Mittal, Chairman, Bharati said, "Unnecessarily, there is too much speculation and in terms of putting any industrial combination together, there is no discussion."
Analysts said that as the MTN-Bharati talks could not possibly bring a tie-up, new telecom players would emerge to go for it. Girish Trivedi, Deputy Director of the telecommunications practice at Frost & Sullivan for South Asia and the Middle East, said that companies like China Mobile or China Telecom could be serious contenders in any battle for MTN. "They have deep pockets, government backing and some of the largest subscriber bases in the world," he noted.
Earlier, Reliance Communication had also initiated talks to have stake in MTN but collapsed it after the initial stage.
