MyAdhan Blog

Link: Vodafone Led Team Pays $2.1 Billion for Qatar License

Vodafone Group Plc, the world’s biggest mobile-phone company, and its local partner will pay 7.72 billion riyals ($2.1 billion) for Qatar’s second wireless license as Vodafone expands in emerging markets. Vodafone and the Qatar Foundation will start the service in the first quarter of 2009 and must sell a 40 percent stake in the venture to the Qatari public by December, the Supreme Council of Information & Communication Technology said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. Mark Pursey, a Vodafone spokesman, said the company’s contribution will be 200 million pounds ($396 million). Vodafone, based in Newbury, England, has expanded in emerging markets in the past two years with purchases in Turkey and India to make up for slower growth in Europe. In Qatar, owner of the world’s largest natural gas field, the group will compete with former monopoly Qatar Telecom QSC in a country of about 900,000 people and a gross domestic product per capita of $75,900, more than double that of the European Union. `$2.1 billion is fair value by Gulf standards to compete against the region’s last monopoly,” Andrawes Snobar, an analyst at Arab Advisors Group in Jordan, said in a phone interview today. “Although Qatar’s penetration rate is already above 100 percent, they should be able to win share from Qatar Telecom.” Saudi Telecom won Kuwait’s third mobile-phone license in November with a bid of $908 million. Zain led a group that won Saudi Arabia’s third mobile-phone license with a $6.1 billion offer in March 2007.