Zain has accepted an offer from India’s Bharti Airtel to purchase the African assets of the Kuwaiti telecoms operator for US$10.7 billion, reports The Times of India (TOI) according to sources familiar with the matter. The deal does not include Sudan or Morocco.

Zain posted a statement on its website on February 14, confirming it had received an offer and that its board of directors would be discussing the proposal at its board meeting on the same day. According to TOI’s sources, the Kuwait Investment Authority – which holds a 24.6 per cent stake in Zain, met on Sunday ahead of Zain’s board meeting and unanimously approved the transaction. It is believed the group’s shareholders also held talks with Bharti’s fellow Indian rival Reliance Communications.

Zain Africa, formerly branded Celtel, includes approximately 42 million subscribers and represents around 58 per cent of the operator’s customers as of end-September 2009. Bharti Airtel is India’s largest operator and has almost 125 million subscribers across India.

Zain’s CEO for the past seven years Saad Al Barrak resigned on February 3, prompted by frustration with unilateral shareholder action. Over the past six months, company shareholders led by the Kharafi Group held negotiations with a Malaysian-Indian consortium over the proposed sale of a 46 per cent stake in the Kuwait mobile operator group. The shareholders made it clear that the negotiations for the sale were taking place at shareholder level, with little-to-no input from Zain’s executive management. Kharafi Group, owned by one of the Middle East’s wealthiest families, holds 11 per cent in Zain.

Kuwait’s former minister of communication, Nabil Bin Salama, began his tenure as chief executive of the group commencing yesterday, replacing the outgoing Al Barrak.

Paris-based telecoms vendor Alcatel-Lucent claimed a minor profit in the fourth quarter, but failed to pull itself out of the red for the full year. Despite fourth quarter revenues being down 19.9 per cent year-on-year, it reported a Q4 net profit of €46 million. However, the full year net loss came in at €524 million (US$723 million), a stark contrast from the €5.215 billion loss for the full year 2008.

Fourth quarter revenues reached €3.967 billion, with an operating cash flow of €635 million. Annual revenues were down 10.8 per cent year-on-year to €15.157 billion. The net debt as of December 31, 2009 was €886 million.

“We delivered on our commitments for 2009 and I am pleased with the operational progress we have made,” commented CEO Ben Verwaayen.

“Revenue came in at the lower end of the indicated range for the year due to the fact that our fourth quarter was not as strong as expected. However, I am encouraged by the strong sequential growth in our orders and by the accelerated traction we are seeing in next generation technologies, as evidenced by our selection by AT&T as a key supplier for LTE.”

He added that Alcatel-Lucent materially exceeded its cost and expense reduction target in 2009, allowing the company to be around breakeven at the adjusted operating income level for the year. Additionally, in the last two quarters the firm demonstrated its ability to generate cash through a more disciplined management of its working capital.

During 2009, Europe remained the vendor’s most important market contributing 34 per cent of revenues, followed by North America with 31 per cent and Asia Pacific with 20 per cent. The rest of the world accounted for the remaining 15 per cent of revenues.

Egyptian mobile operator Mobinil recorded a fourth quarter net profit of EGP 581 million (US$106 million), a growth of 5.4 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier. Revenues reached EGP 2.8 billion with EBITDA of EGP 1.32 billion.

Annual net profit for 2009 increased three per cent year-on-year to EGP 2.04 billion (US$371.5 million), while revenues grew eight per cent to EGP 10.81 billion. Full-year EBITDA reached EGP 5.122 million, an increase of nine per cent over 2008.

Subscriber numbers increased to 25.354 million by the end of December 2009, an addition of 5.24 million subscribers or growth of 26 per cent from a year earlier.

"The year 2009 was filled with intense challenges and adverse conditions driven by the global economic
crisis and aggressive competition," Mobinil Chairman Alex Shalaby said in the earnings statement. “I am really delighted to see the level of growth achieved given the tough conditions we operated under during the year.

The operator has been engaged in an ownership dispute between its two main shareholders, Egypt’s Orascom Telecom and France Telecom (FT). A detailed ruling is expected within the coming week, after an administrative court previously blocked the regulator’s decision for FT to purchase outstanding shares in the Egyptian Company for Mobile Services (ECMS), which operates under the Mobinil brand name.

India’s largest mobile operator, Bharti Airtel, has awarded Nokia Siemens Network a US$700 million network expansion contract. The vendor will expand and upgrade Airtel’s 2.5G network to increase network capacity by 50 per cent in eight telecommunications circles.

The GSM expansion will cover the circles of Mumbai, Maharashtra and Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand, Orissa, Kolkata and West Bengal, where Nokia Siemens Networks already provides equipment and managed services for the telco. With almost 60 percent of Airtel’s monthly customers coming from rural regions, this contract will enable it to further aggressively expand its footprint into rural India.

“This expansion will not only expand our networks deeper into the rural hinterland but will also allow us to deliver a rich end-user experience, and satisfy the increasing demand for top-quality services,” said Sanjay Kapoor, chief executive officer designate, Bharti Airtel.

NSN’S contract includes network planning, implementation and project management, handling of local logistics and materials, as well as system integration for the base station sites. In addition, the company will ensure that the operator’s core and transport network is 3G-ready in order to reduce time to market and enable the fast rollout of 3G services at a later date.

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is among Asia’s leading integrated telecom services providers with operations in India and Sri Lanka, and in January it gained the approval to acquire 70 per cent of Warid Bangladesh. In South Asia, the company had an aggregate of over 125.3 million customers as of end-December 2009, including 120.23 million mobile customers.

MTN Group, Vodacom and Cell C all intend to reduce interconnection rates across the board on March 1, whether the country’s telecoms regulator approves the proposal or not.

Cell C’s had of regulatory affairs Nadia Bulbulia told South African TV the mobile companies plan to resubmit a proposal to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa this week (ICASA). ICASA rebuffed the operators’ original plan.

Under the suggested scheme, the three operators will reduce peak rates charged to connect phone calls between networks from 1.25 rand to 89 cents (US$0.11). Off-peak rates would remain at 77 cents.