Mobinil is set to list up to 15 per cent of its stock or sell a stake to a local partner, according to parent Orange.

Mobinil is 99 per cent owned by Orange, and the company’s chief executive Stephane Richard said it will either list between 10 – 15 per cent of the company on the Cairo bourse, or seek new local strategic partners in 2016, according to Reuters.

The Egypt cellco said in March it would look to seek additional capital by the end of this year.

In a press conference, Richard also revealed Orange will increase its stake in its Moroccan subsidiary Meditel from 40 per cent to 49 per cent. He also said Tunisia is another market where it might expand.

Orange is banking on growth in Africa and the Middle East after selling off parts of its mobile business in Europe, including stakes in the UK, Switzerland and Portugal.

Orange has also been looking at ways to create a separate unit for Middle East and Africa to attract investors. Previously, it has been reported that Orange has plans to spin off the emerging markets business.

Combined, Orange has almost 100 million connections in the Middle East and Africa according to GSMA Intelligence, with Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal and Mali among its largest operations.

Vodafone Qatar reported that for its fiscal full-year to end-March 2015 the operator experienced mobile customer growth of nine per cent to 1.44 million.

The cellco reported revenue for the year amounted to QAR2.31 billion (US$635 million), up 16 per cent year-on-year, while ARPU amounted to QAR122.

Vodafone Qatar’s EBITDA margin was stable at 25 per cent, with EBITDA for the full financial year coming in at QAR 566 million, an increase of 14 per cent year-on-year.

Net loss improved by 12 per cent to a loss of QAR216 million, while capital investment increased 68 per cent to QAR579 million, representing 25 per cent of revenue reinvested.

The Vodafone Qatar board recommended a dividend payment to its shareholders of 2.1 per cent of nominal share value (QAR 0.21 per share), representing a 24 per cent increase on the company’s maiden dividend paid last year.

Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report contains a forecast of 26 billion connected devices by 2020, seemingly a big cut to its well-publicised previous vision of 50 billion in that timeframe.

The network vendor first outlined its vision for 50 billion connected devices in 2009, and has repeated the claim for more than five years as part of its Networked Society ideology.

Ericsson is now claiming the 50 billion number was a vision rather than a specific forecast, which it made before 4G was rolled out and smartphones had become ubiquitous.

Today, Ericsson says the industry is “well on the way to reaching the vision of 50 billion connected devices”.

No timeframe for that goal was mentioned in the report, but the company said that “50 billion connected devices is a good milestone that we believe will be reached sometime after 2020”.

Today’s market stands at around 13.5 billion, according to Ericsson, including (in order of size) mobile phones, PC/laptop/tablets/routers, connected consumer electronics, M2M, and fixed phones.

Ericsson was the first of the big network vendors to forecast huge growth in the connected device and Internet of Things space. Cisco also said there will be 50 billion “connected things” in the next five years, while Huawei forecast there will be 100 billion terminals interconnected by the Internet by 2025, as ICT becomes more embedded in everyday life and across all industries. 

Ericsson also forecast that 70 per cent of people globally will be using smartphones, and 90 per cent of the world will be covered by broadband networks, by 2020.

In the same year, it forecasts smartphone subscriptions will reach approximately 6.1 billion globally.

This, the fifth instalment of Comm.’s Decisive dozen list of operator CEOs in the Middle East and Africa, has altered remarkably compared to last year’s, and previous years in fact. Aside from the typical attrition that occurs in senior postings, dramatic events in the 12 months of 2014 also led to personalities slipping down the list, or falling off altogether, as the pressure to continue producing positive results in a challenging environment persisted

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Nokia today announced having effectively merged the IT and telco cloud domains with the launch of its AirFrame Data Centre Solution. According to the vendor this is the first offering that combines the benefits of cloud computing technologies with the stringent requirements of the core and radio in the telco world.

The Nokia AirFrame Data Centre Solution is 5G-ready and supports the vision of a more flexible and distributed cloud architecture, which is the foundation to deliver the latency and data processing requirements of the future.

In developing AirFrame, Nokia Networks has invested in further advancing the data centre hardware technology. The company believes its innovations will deliver acceleration capabilities that will help operator customers be more efficient and differentiate themselves in the market. To continue advancing its solutions, Nokia Networks has opened a dedicated R&D facility for data centre technology development.