Etisalat and Nokia have announced a joint collaboration to provide access to advanced mobile Internet based services. These services include maps, navigation and games on Nokia devices, based on the Ovi services platform provided by Nokia.

Left: Urpo Karjalainen, senior vice president, operator sales, Nokia; right: Essa Al Haddad, Etisalat’s chief marketing officer

In the first phase of the collaboration, Etisalat’s UAE mobile customers will be able to access Ovi Maps and N-Gage games on their Nokia devices, through straight forward payment mechanism. Subscribers to Ovi Maps and purchasers of N-Gage games can choose to combine their payments for these advanced mobile Internet based services with their Etisalat account. The payment will be directed to their account automatically, if chosen accordingly, while customers will also have the existing option of paying over their credit cards.

The UAE will be the first country in the Middle East and Africa to roll out this service during Q209, while the cooperation will be extended to other Etisalat operations in the Middle East and Africa in due course.

“We are excited to be further promoting our good cooperation with Etisalat. As market leaders, this agreement allows us to combine great services with ease of accessibility to provide consumers with a seamless user experience,” said Urpo Karjalainen, senior vice president, operator sales, Nokia.

Ovi allows easy access to Nokia services including maps, navigation, games, messaging and music, as well as the ability to manage, sync, and share personal files or information.

Ovi, the consumer brand for Nokia Internet services, brings together the online world, the mobile device and computer into a consistent consumer experience.

Delta Partners’ private equity fund has closed a further two investments since late last year, doubling the number of investments in its portfolio to four. The fund was initially established in March 2007.

Puelinckx is happy for the fund to take its time in selecting the best investment opportunities

At the beginning of February Delta Partners announced the successful closing of the ADC (Armenian Datacom Company) transaction, representing the telecom fund’s fourth acquisition. Delta Partners agreed to invest US$6 million as an equity injection and acquire 39 per cent of ADC, with the aim to develop the company’s service portfolio and support geographical expansion.

ADC is a Norwegian-Armenian joint-venture established in 2006 by Yerevan Telecom and Norwegian investors. ADC offers data communications and broadband services over its own 400 kilometres of fibre network in Yerevan (the capital of Armenia) to the corporate segment. ADC plans to expand its broadband services to the residential segment by Q209 as well as expand its geographic footprint to several other Armenian urban centres.

The proceeds of Delta Partners’ investment in ADC will be primarily used to expand into Internet provisioning for the residential segment in large Armenian cities, and also to fund the expansion of the fibre backbone to the border with Georgia.

Late last year, Delta Partners announced the fund’s third investment, in partnership with ADIC MENA Partners. At the end of December 2008 the two companies formalised participation in the investment group that acquired OrasInvest from Orascom Telecom Holding, in a leveraged buyout worth US$180 million.

Delta Partners worked with ADIC MENA Partners in negotiating the OrasInvest deal, announced in November. ADIC MENA Partners, the lead partner in the investment group, is a private equity fund advised by ADIC PE Management, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Company.

OrasInvest is a telecommunications support company focussing on mobile telecoms tower construction and other corporate services such as inventory management, packaging, delivery and collection. It is headquartered in Cairo and has operations in six other countries outside of Egypt – Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. OrasInvest is expected to end 2008 with revenues in excess of US$ 175 million.

Speaking to Comm. last August, Delta Partners’ managing partner Kristoff Puelinckx, said the company’s telecom fund was established with a target annual rate of return of 25 per cent, focussing on taking minority or majority stakes worth anywhere between US$3 million and US$15 million per investment. The total size of the fund is US$100 million.

At the end of 2007 Delta Partners’ announced its first investment, which was in Karoui & Karoui, an integrated pan-Maghrebian advertising and media company specialising in providing services to telecoms operators as well as to clients in other industries.

Last May Delta Partners announced it had entered into the Russian telecoms market in collaboration with Richard Branson’s Virgin Group to establish a new broadband access provider, known as Virgin Connect. Delta Partners invested in Trivon Group, a Swiss-based telecoms holding company providing Internet access services in the main Russian regions, jointly with Virgin Group and Eurasia Capital Management. Virgin Connect provides broadband Internet connectivity, voice and value added services to both residential and corporate markets.

“By the end of this year we would have invested 60-80 per cent of the capital (in the telecoms investment fund),” Puelinckx commented last August. “We have an investment period of three years, so there’s still time to build up deals.”

Bharti Telesoft, a provider of integrated value added solutions for mobile operators in emerging markets, has announced the launch of its new name, ‘Comviva’, and its new company name—Comviva Technologies Limited—accompanied by a company-wide re-branding initiative to present a unified approach to the market.

Manoranjan (Mao) Mohapatra, CEO of Comviva Technologies

The name Comviva was created by the company and signifies ‘communication is life’. Comviva aims to capture the spirit of the company’s new vision – to enrich the lives of over a billion people with value added telecoms solutions that enhance their livelihood and lifestyle. It also reflects the company’s intent – to be the No.1 integrated VAS provider in its chosen markets, based on a foundation of excellence, innovation and partnerships.

Communication is at the heart of Comviva’s business, with content, community and commerce related services enriching the lives of mobile users and driving growth for mobile operators.

“The need for a powerful, unique brand that resonates with customers globally has grown as we have extended our reach. With 100 plus customers across over 80 countries, our new brand, Comviva, will help us achieve our vision of enriching people’s lives and will support us in building stronger bridges with customers, consumers and communities globally. Comviva will be the leading global brand in the mobile value added communications space,” commented Manoranjan (Mao) Mohapatra, CEO, Comviva Technologies Limited.

Batelco has appointed a new CEO to run the telco’s day-to-day activities, as former country CEO, Peter Kaliaropoulos assumes the role of CEO for the overall Batelco Group, which has activities spanning Bahrain, India, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait and Yemen.

Rieder will take charge of Batelco’s day-to-day operations, as Kaliaropoulos focuses on group activities

Gert Rieder’s appointment as Batelco Bahrain CEO comes as part of the telco’s restructuring programme, which is aimed at managing the growing needs of the organisation. In the past year Batelco has expanded into significant territories including Saudi Arabia and India, with the contribution made by operations outside of Bahrain rising all the time. Kaliaropoulos, who was appointed CEO of Batelco in June 2005, has been largely responsible for the telco’s impressive international expansion.

“I have got to find growth and I’ll find growth in two areas, in what I call adjacent markets – which may be moving up the value chain, from just being a connectivity provider of fixed and wireless… But I also have to find growth in adjacent geographies,” Kaliaropoulos stated shortly after his appointment.

Prior to joining Batelco, Rieder was senior advisor for ENEX Finance, a private equity company based in Switzerland. He has over 20 years experience in the telecoms sector having begun his career in 1987 with TDC (TeleDanmark). He held various roles and executive positions within TDC including director Residential FixNet division, director business division, senior VP for mobile marketing and wholesale divisions.

In 1997, Rieder joined Sunrise Communications, a telecommunications service provider in Switzerland that is a joint venture between TDC, BT and three Swiss partners, as chief commercial officer. In 2001 he was promoted to COO Sunrise Mobile. From 2004 until 2008 Rieder was executive VP for TDC Residential and member of the executive team in TDC Solutions.

Rieder holds an executive MBA from INSEAD in France.

Batelco reported net profit of BD104.2 million (US$276.4 million) for 2008, up 2.7 per cent over 2007. Revenues for the year grew by 8.9 per cent year-on-year to BD319.1 million, while net revenues were up10.1 per cent to BD251.4 million. The telco counted 4.3 million subscribers across its operations at the end of 2008.

Nigeria’s mobile communications sector added 7.15 million net new subscribers in Q408 to end-December, taking the total number of subscribers in the market to 62.99 million. The addition of 22.59 million subscribers represented a 56 per cent annual growth rate, with recent figures from the Nigerian telecom regulator NCC showing that a further 1.17 million mobile subscribers were added during January 2009 to raise the country’s end-January total to 64.16 million.

GSM market leader MTN recorded a gain of 2.91 million in Q408 – a Nigerian record. It ended the year with 23.08 million users, almost 6 million ahead of nearest rival Zain, which ended the year with 17.20 million users. Having wrestled second place from Glo Mobile in Q308, Zain consolidated its lead in Q4, adding 1.29 million customers compared to the 630,000 added by Glo Mobile, which ended the year on just over 16 million users.

The two remaining GSM networks in Nigeria are government-owned Nitel, which counted 260 million customers at the end of the year, and the latest entrant Etisalat, which managed to added almost 400,00 customers in its first quarter of operation.

There are now four mobile CDMA networks operating in Nigeria, and they contributed to the quarterly gain. On aggregate, they added 1.93 million customers in Q4, only just behind the record gain of 2.01 million recorded in the previous quarter. This took the total mobile CDMA customer base 6.05 million at the end of the year; although the NCC’s figures show that there was a net loss in January, driving the base back down to 5.87 million.

In terms of individual operators’ performances in Q408, Visafone added 980,000 subscribers, ending the period with 2.21 million compared with the 1.99 million subscribers on Multi-Links’ network. The former leading CDMA operator in Nigeria added 510,000 subscribers in the quarter. Meanwhile, Starcomms added 360,000 users in Q408 to break the one million barrier, ending the quarter on 1.16 million users. Reliance is Nigeria’s fourth CDMA operator and was able to garner 70,000 subscribers in its first two months of operation to end-2008.