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Bharti Airtel is learnt to be considering a bid for South African telecom firm MTN, which has operations in over 20 countries. If successful, it will catapult the company into the league of top global telecom players.
MTN has 68.2 million subscribers and its largest operations are in South Africa, Nigeria and Iran. Its market capitalisation is $33 billion, slightly below Bharti Airtel's Rs 175,613 crore (almost $44 billion).
Bharti, the country's largest private provider of telecom services, has around 62 million mobile subscribers and another two million fixed-line subscribers.
"We cannot talk on specific proposals. But we are interested in looking at offers which fit into our strategy," Bharti Airtel Joint Managing Director Akhil Gupta said.
However, he added that the company's board had met today not to discuss whether or not it should make a bid for MTN but only to take up the results.
On its part, MTN said in a statement: "MTN receives tentative approaches from time to time, which are always evaluated by the company. The board of MTN has not received any specific proposal and if and when there is anything specific to report, the market will be notified."
However, experts said that a bid for MTN might be difficult for Bharti as it involves a large pile of cash. MTN is also learnt to have had some discussions with Datacom Solutions, promoted by Venugopal Dhoot, which has recently received a pan-Indian licence to operate GSM services. MTN might pick up equity or formulate an alternative model in the tie-up.
