MTN Group Ltd, Africa’s largest mobile-phone company, may merge with Reliance Communications Ltd, India’s second-biggest, to offer wireless services to 1.7 billion people after talks with Bharti Airtel Ltd collapsed.
MTN, based in Johannesburg, and Mumbai-based Reliance are in exclusive talks for as long as 45 days to combine their businesses, they said in separate statements yesterday. There is no certainty on the completion or the timing of any agreement, they said, without providing details.
Any agreement will depend on whether Reliance chairman Anil Ambani and MTN chief executive Phutuma Nhleko can agree on control of an operator with a combined market value of more than US$65 billion stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Himalayas. Bharti ended talks with MTN after failing to overcome differences over ownership and management.
“Reliance may be one company that could possibly do it,” Apurva Shah, head of research at Prabhudas Lilladher Pvt in Mumbai, said by telephone after Bharti’s announcement on May 24.
“If it was tough for Bharti, it will be tough for other Indian companies,” Shah said.
Reliance declined as much as 4 percent in Mumbai trading, valuing it at US$27 billion, while Bharti, India’s biggest mobile- phone company, gained 4.3 percent, giving it a market value of US$38 billion.
MTN slumped as much as 6.4 percent, paring its value to US$36 billion.
Any investment by Ambani will be in addition to the US$6.5 billion he is spending this year to build a second mobile phone network and increase coverage. India added a record 10.2 million subscribers in March and surpassed the US last month as the world’s largest mobile phone market after China.
Reliance began talks to buy a majority stake in MTN, the Business Standard reported on its Web site on May 24, citing people it didn’t identify.
Gaurav Wahi, a Reliance Communications spokesman, declined to specify which company would control the combined entity in a telephone interview from Mumbai yesterday.
Bharti said it ended the talks after MTN presented a new structure in which Bharti Airtel would become a subsidiary of the South African firm. Billionaire chairman Sunil Mittal and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd would have had to exchange their majority stake in Bharti Airtel for a controlling stake in MTN, according to the structure, Bharti said.
The end of the talks is “positive for Bharti’s share price as this lifts the cloud of uncertainty that was hanging over it,” Shah said.
“From a long-term perspective, it is negative” because Bharti would have benefited from the expansion in its operations, he said.
Nhleko has driven MTN’s expansion north from South Africa into 21 countries throughout the continent and the Middle East, covering a region with a combined population of more than 500 million people.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has