Etisalat has started a tidying up exercise of its African assets ahead of its planned acquisition of a majority stake in Maroc Telecom.

As part of the plans, Maroc Telecom is paying US$650 million to buy Etisalat’s existing stakes in a number of African mobile networks. Etisalat will then purchase a 53 per cent stake in Maroc Telecom, so the net effect is negligible, but it does combine the two companies’ respective African networks into a single holding company.

Etisalat has subsidiaries in Benin, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Niger and Togo while Maroc Telecom has operations in Gabon, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Mali.

The sale of the Etisalat networks to Maroc Telecom is conditional on the sale of Maroc Telecom to Etisalat completing.

Ericsson has been awarded a contract to deploy the first LTE and VoLTE-enabled network in Northern Africa for Algerie Telecom.

The network will be a fixed-wireless based broadband Internet service.

Massive demand for broadband services is putting extreme strain on Algeria’s existing copper/fibre fixed-broadband network. Ericsson’s initial deployment will cover "white spots" that do not currently have broadband access, before extending to high-density locations such as universities, airports and commercial districts.

MTN ‘s mobile network in Uganda has announced that its subscriber base reached 9.5 million at the end of the first quarter with more than half using its mobile money service.

According to the results, MTN Uganda continued to show good growth and increased market share despite the high levels of competition in the market. Increased penetration into rural areas and improved network quality further supported this growth.

Local currency data revenue also increased by 67.7 per cent and now contributes to 23.5 per cent of MTN Uganda’s revenue.

MTN Mobile Money remains the fastest growing product in Uganda with more than five million registered users each transacting on average five times a month. The popularity and growth of MTN Mobile Money is supported by a large agent network exceeding 30,000 agents.

As of March 31, MTN Uganda total data subscribers exceeded 2.6 million.

Nawras today reported that revenues for Q114 grew by 9.4 per cent year-on-year to OMR52.7 million (US$137 million) driven by increases in both fixed and mobile data revenue as well as international voice revenue offset by a decrease in SMS revenue.

EBITDA amounted to OMR26.6 million, up 15.7 per cent, driven by the increase in revenue. Net profit for the quarter was OMR8.8 million, up 14.3 per cent year-on-year, with the total number of customers growing by 8.9 per cent in Q114 to 2.43 million.

The fixed service customer base grew by 27.5 per cent to 65,728 customers in Q114, with the mobile post-paid customer base growing by four per cent to 189,554 customers, and the mobile prepaid customer base increasing by 8.8 per cent to 2.18 million.

Samsung Electronics has reported a modest rise in its first quarter revenues but that masked a four per cent fall in its mobile phone division.

The company posted revenues of KRW53.7 trillion (US$52 billion), and a US$500 million increase in profits to KRW7.57 trillion (USD7.5 billion).

Capital expenditure in the first quarter amounted to KRW5.4 trillion, which includes KRW3.3 trillion for the memory business and KRW700 billion for display.

Although market demand for both smartphones and tablets decreased during Q1 quarter-on-quarter, operating profits for the division jumped 18 per cent compared with the previous quarter thanks to steady smartphone shipments and a positive impact from adjustments of one-off expenses.

Samsung said that it expects to see profits rally in the second quarter and beyond, on the back of improved sales of display panels and home appliances. Orders for display panels that are used for premium smartphones and TVs are expected to increase, as new mobile devices are rolled out into the market and as consumers look forward to the upcoming World Cup in Brazil.