France Telecom SA (FTE) may spend about $2 billion to buy most of billionaire Naguib Sawiris’s stake in their Egyptian wireless venture and delist Egypt’s biggest phone operator by revenue.
France’s largest telecommunications company reached a preliminary agreement with Sawiris’s Orascom Telecom Media & Technology Holding SAE over Egyptian Co. for Mobile Services, the operator known as Mobinil, at 202.5 Egyptian pounds ($33.54) a share, it said today. That’s 8.7 percent less than the price it would have paid under an earlier option agreement with Sariwis. France Telecom will offer the same price for Mobinil shares traded on the Cairo exchange. Mobinil jumped by a daily limit of 10 percent today.
France Telecom is refocusing its business on fast-growing emerging markets as mobile revenue in Europe stalls. The Paris- based company has announced the sale of its units in Switzerland and Austria, and in the past two years struck deals to enter Morocco, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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