Eaton Towers has secured a US$30 million loan to fund its expansion into Ghana. The transaction was signed in December 2011 and provides for a five-year senior secured term loan facility to fund the enhancement and upgrade of towers under a site sharing and maintenance agreement contract with Vodafone Ghana.

It will fund further capital expenditure in relation to the build-out of up to 300 additional wireless towers in Ghana.

"We are delighted to have completed our first bank debt financing with Standard Bank Group, commented Peter Lewis, Eaton Towers’ chief financial officer. “Given our strong deal pipeline and the interest we are seeing from financial and development institutions, we are confident that this will be the first of many such financing deals.”

The company had already secured US$150 million of private equity funding last September.

BLADNA, which means ‘homeland’ in Arabic, has commenced service as a MVNO in Italy, focused on the North African community living in the country. The company, which is a subsidiary of Vodafone Egypt, will cater for the growing North African community in Italy comprised mainly of Egyptian, Moroccan and North African nationals. Planning, implementation and launch of the MVNO was achieved in the space of two months.

Effortel, the mobile virtual network operator and enabler, announced it is powering BLADNA, and that this is not the first time it has supported an MVNO venture in the Italian market; as it currently powers Carrefour Uno Mobile and Daily Telecom, an ethnic MVNO dedicated to the Chinese community in Italy.

Effortel already has experience of deploying an Arabic-language MVNO, its technology platform powers Samatel in Oman.

“The Arab ethnic community is considered to be one of the largest foreign immigrant communities living in Italy mainly coming from North Africa,” said Sherine Fouad, MD of BLADNA. BLADNA was designed to cater for the needs of this rapidly-growing Arabic community in Italy.

Airspan Networks has won a WiMAX network deployment contract from AfriConnect Zambia, an Internet service provider and subsidiary of the Vodacom Group.

The contract is for the delivery of Airspan 4G equipment for the delivery of broadband services to the Zambian capital, Lusaka, and several other major cities.

The deployment, operating in the 2.5GHz band, uses Airspan’s Air4G compact, macro base station. The first phase of the project includes several thousand subscriber terminals to be deployed in Lusaka, and is expected to expand coverage into additional towns and cities.

The equipment being provided is dual-mode WiMAX/LTE offering a potential migration to LTE in the future.

Fitch Ratings says maturing market penetration rates aligned with increased competition will offset strong economic fundamentals due to high oil prices, population growth and higher wages for state employees. Fitch therefore expects at best a stabilisation of overall revenues in Middle East telecom.

However, Fitch still sees the possibility of some revenue contraction in 2012 as data revenue and the new driver of growth, mobile broadband fail to offset the fundamental decline in voice revenue. Pressure on average revenue per user (ARPU) levels due to a saturated voice market that still remains the major contributor to overall revenues could be highlighted as the main mid-term trend.

"Although the heightened level of competition is leading to lower operating margins for most Middle Eastern telecom, Fitch believes that the credit outlook for the top-four telecoms is stable due to strong credit metrics and positive free cash flow (FCF) generation capability" said Bulent Akgul, director of Fitch’s EMEA Telecommunications, Media and Technology team. "Regulatory risk still remains benign due to the state’s involvement in major telecom operators and disruptive technologies are mostly being kept at bay at the moment" added Akgul.

Mobile data traffic growth will continue to grow at double-digit rates in 2012 but this will only partially offset some of the competitive pressure on ARPU’s and margin. Furthermore, mobile data packages will have to become more affordable for the predominantly prepaid subscription base that has been under significant pricing competition. Some prominent mobile operators would also like to rely on the convergence of the telecom, media and financial services, but Fitch believes this is merely a long-term prospect.

The agency still expects high single digit growth in selected markets such as the politically unstable Iraq and Yemen as well as the mobile segment for the North African market due to its under-penetrated nature and under-investment in the fixed-line sector. However, new untapped subscriber growth is being gained at the expense of cheaper service offerings, as profit margins and ARPUs fall.

The main motivations for buyouts and expected consolidation are limited growth prospects in most of the bigger markets and falling EBITDA margins that will come under further pressure due to mostly increased competition. The leading players in the sector are also largely cash rich, and as the global economic environment shows signs of slower growth, Fitch believes that the pressure to use this cash for M&A may build again.

Certain markets such as Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain remain highly competitive while Saudi Arabia and the UAE may become even more competitive due to the maturity of these markets.

The Algerian government is set to acquire a majority stake in the country’s largest mobile operator Djezzy, potentially ending a long-running dispute with the cellco’s owner, Orascom, over ownership of the operator.

The deal appears to have been brokered by VimpelCom, Orascom’s majority-owner. In a statement, VimpelCom said it has entered into a non-binding MoU with the Algerian state and “agreed that it will consider selling a majority stake in Orascom Telecom Algerie (OTA), subject to an acceptable price and satisfaction of other conditions.”

Financial terms were not disclosed, though both parties are to “undertake a process to agree on the valuation of OTA with the involvement of each party’s financial advisors.”

Relations between Orascom and the Algerian government had broken down prior to VimpelCom’s acquisition of Orascom, which closed last year, with the government objecting to Orascom’s efforts to sell its local unit to a foreign partner and wanting to nationalise it instead. Tensions were further ramped up when the government subsequently served Orascom with a US$230 million tax bill, which was disputed by the firm.

While the dispute complicated the VimpelCom/Orascom merger it is thought that the influence of a third party (VimpelCom) may have been instrumental in reaching the agreement. VimpelCom noted that Orascom “has not been party to the discussions regarding the MoU and the transaction.”

Djezzy had 16.3 million subscribers at end-Q3, giving it a 44 per cent share of the Algerian mobile market.