Contrary to expectations, Bharti Airtel and MTN are unlikely to get a chance to revive their mega cross-border merger talks at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference in Geneva, Switzerland, next week.
There has been talk of a possible meeting between Bharti chairman Sunil Mittal and MTN CEO Phuthuma Nhleko at the conference, to be held between October 5 and 9. However, the South African company is not listed as a participant yet, though a last-minute entry cannot be ruled out.
Perchance, South Africa’s communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda, who gave away the outcome on the Bharti-MTN deal on the D-Day, is slated to speak at the event, in the same session as J S Sarma, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Even before the announcement of the closure of talks between Bharti and MTN on September 30, Nyanda had told the media that MTN must not move into the hands and management of foreign nationals and that its management must remain South African.
Mittal, who is now in Thailand on an offsite, is expected to proceed to Geneva from there. He will speak on the opening day of the conference, along with other biggies like Orascom chairman Naguib Sawiris, Vodafone group external affairs director Matthew Kirk, NTT DoCoMo president Ryuji Yamada, Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter, KDDI (Japan) president Tadashi Onodera, Telekom Malaysia CEO Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa, and Telefonica international office director Carlos Lopez Blanco.
Bahrain-based Zain group’s chief regulatory affairs officer Lynne A Dorward would also be a panelist in a session during the Geneva summit.Thus, Bharti may well get to dial companies other than MTN. The buzz now is that it may explore deals with Egypt’s Orascom and Bahrain’s Zain, among others.
Bharti announced earlier this week that it has closed talks with MTN for a $24-billion cross-border merger transaction. The deadline for the exclusive talks, which had begun on May 26, expired on September 30 after two extensions. The Bharti group said in a statement, “We hope the South African government will review its position in the future and allow both companies an opportunity to re-engage.”
The structure of the proposed deal needed an approval from the government of South Africa, which has expressed its inability to accept it in the current form, Bharti said. Adding, “In view of this, both companies have taken the decision to disengage from discussion.”
Comments