Vodafone has expressed interest in buying out the stake in its Egyptian joint venture with Telecom Egypt, sending the landline monopoly’s share price surging to its highest level since early this year.

Vodafone Egypt is a joint venture between the two companies, with Telecom Egypt owning a 45 per cent stake in the company. The stake has been valued at around US$2 billion.

There have been expectations that Telecom Egypt may sell its stake for the past year or so ever since the telecom regulator said it would grant the landline monopoly an MVNO licence to start offering its own mobile services.

Vodafone is now ready to buy the 45 per cent stake, an official at the company told Bloomberg News, declining to be identified because he is not authorised to comment on the matter.

Telecom Egypt is listed on the local stock exchange, but is 80 per cent owned by the government.

Zimbabwean mobile network operator, TelOne has written off US$80 million of its customers’ bills in a one-off reduction being applied to their accounts.

The company, which is state-owned will apply a credit equivalent to US$257.82 to each customer account.

Some customers are said to have accrued substantial debts with the phone provider due to the currency crisis that hit the country some years ago.

TelOne said that the cancellation was in view of the "cash-flow challenges currently facing our clients across the market", and more likely reflecting the reality that it would not be able to recover the unpaid debts that had been built up in recent years.

The currency problems also affected the telecom networks, which struggled to buy infrastructure that was usually billed for in US dollars.

Huawei today unveiled its Agile Switch S12700; a networking product that is ready to accommodate the future mode of Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) that allows networks to be easily built and programmed for businesses to make faster decisions on a software-based infrastructure that is more flexible than ever before.

The product launch was hosted during GITEX Technology Week. Huawei has brought about a new generation of switching technologies that are smarter, and more agile for switches to be easily programmed to accommodate virtually all network needs for all levels of business today and in the future.

The launch of Huawei’s Agile Switch S12700 brings a host of business benefits, allowing decisions not only to be made automatically and quickly, but also frees up network resources so that decision makers are able to focus on their core business. The Agile Switch series is designed to prepare itself for the SDN era, which will assist end-users with addressing the future challenges of network development and convergence.

The unveiling of Huawei’s Agile S12700 switch series in the Middle East comes at a time where the industry is witnessing the convergence of data centres, wireless and wide area network (WAN) technology.

Huawei’s Agile S12700 switch series uses a fully programmable switching architecture to allow even faster and more network customization, ready to make a swift move to the future of SDN. Featuring automatic network deployment and management applications, the S12700 supports end-to-end security collaboration with the flexibility of enabling fast-changing services.

Millicom announced that its third quarter revenue had increased by 7.6per cent to US$1.29 billion. This would have reached 10 per cent were it not for the negative impact of regulatory measures.

Group EBITDA came in at US$459 million with an underlying margin of 38.6 per cent, in line with the company’s expectations and guidance.

The company added a further one million new data users in Q3, bringing the penetration of mobile data within the mobile customer base to over 18 per cent. In the year-to-date around 5.7 per cent of the customer base gained access to data services.

Across its mobile networks, the Millicom added close to 1.5 million net new mobile users.

Commenting on the results, Millicom’s president and CEO Hans-Holger Albrecht said: "This quarter’s strong growth highlights the continuing opportunity in Africa and Latin America. Combined with the shift to data, progress in mobile financial services and the launch of new media services almost weekly, we are on track to deliver the transformation of the company into a digital lifestyle provider."

China’s Lenovo is rumoured to be eying a takeover bid for BlackBerry. The rumours first emerged earlier this year, but now that BlackBerry is formally up for sale, Lenovo is said to be actively considering a bid.

Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal said that Lenovo has signed a non-disclosure agreement with BlackBerry allowing it access to the company’s accounts.

Lenovo already owns a smartphone business of its own, and could consider merging the two operations to strip out costs – or retain its own Chinese focused division and use BlackBerry brand to expand its market as it did with the IBM laptop deal in the past.

Both companies declined to comment on the report.

BlackBerry has already agreed to an in-principle deal to be bought out by a consortium of private equity groups in a US$4.7 billion deal, but that agreement allows it to consider alternative bids.

An offer from Lenovo would be subject to regulatory checks, and the Canadian government has been more cautious in recent months about foreign takeover bids for local firms. However, the government did indicate earlier this year that it would not step in to save the ailing smartphone manufacturer.