Last month Luxembourg-based Millicom International Cellular sealed a pair of deals that will see it exit the African telecom sector once and for all.
Its stake in Ghanaian joint venture AirtelTigo was sold to the country’s government. Tigo Tanzania and Zanzibar Telecommunication (Zantel) were offloaded to a consortium led by Axian—the company that previously acquired Millicom’s Senegal-based business in 2018.
In September 2020, U.S. telecom giant Verizon announced the surprise takeover of prepaid MVNO TracFone Wireless. The deal is worth a whopping $6.25 billion.
Verizon hopes that the transaction will help it compete in the prepaid space, where T-Mobile U.S. and AT&T rule the roost with their Metro by T-Mobile and Cricket Wireless brands.
In December 2019, UK telecom giant BT Group agreed to sell BT Espana to investment fund Portobello Capital. This was the first part of its plan to dismantle and sell off its sprawling BT Global Services unit. This month, BT agreed to offload its Latin American businesses to CIH Telecommunications Americas, marking the second confirmed transaction.
Today we examine BT’s motivations and take a closer look at other businesses that are likely to be sold off.
French billionaire Xavier Niel rose to prominence in the telecom world for his ownership of domestic telco Iliad. You might know Iliad for sparking a price war in the mobile sector when Iliad’s Free Mobile launched in January 2012. (Niel employed a similar price-war tactic when Iliad Italia launched in May 2018.)
But these companies only represent the tip of the iceberg.
Indeed, the size and scale of Niel’s empire are often overlooked due to convoluted shareholder structures and the lack of a unified brand name across markets.
Today we piece it all together to appreciate the bigger picture.
After months of speculation linking Spanish telecom giant Telefonica to a sale of its Central American operations, in January and February 2019 the group agreed to offload all five of its units in the region. Today we look at the deals in question and evaluate how they’ll impact the competitive landscape in Central America.
Mexican telecom giant America Movil (AM) recently struck an agreement to acquire 100 percent of Nextel Brazil from its co-owners, U.S.-based NII Holdings (70 percent) and AI Brazil Holdings (30 percent). They’ll pay $905 million for the business.
When the deal receives regulatory approval, Nextel will likely merge with AM’s existing Claro business. This will make use of Nextel’s substantial spectrum holdings in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
As the telecom world prepares to enter the 5G era, our GlobalComms team has been tracking major 5G auctions around the globe. Catch up on all of them here.
Today we’ll look at what’s happening in major markets in the Middle East. We'll explore what’s happening in the Arab States that border the Persian Gulf, with a focus on Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
