“While the credit crunch has sent a chill through swathes of the market, developing-world telecoms have lost none of their heat,” says John Foley on Breakingviews.com.
The amount of interest in a potential $37bn deal for South Africa’s MTN Group shows that. No sooner did India’s Bharti walk away from the negotiating table on Saturday, than “that spot was quickly filled by another Indian company, Reliance Communications,” says the International Hearald Tribune.
Meanwhile, the $3bn IPO for Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom (NR:SCOM) – East Africa’s largest ever – was four-times oversubscribed, according to Reuters. Celtel Zambia’s forthcoming $1bn float has also proved very popular.
Why so much interest in the African telecoms sector? Simple: “the mobile phone has become the signature technology of the developing world”, says The Economist, but still less than a third of the population own one and subscriptions are projected to grow at 11% a year until 2011. Africa has joined India as one of “the world’s most promising mobile markets”.