From East meets West to Middle East meets Far East

Martin Venzky-Stalling, Managing Director, Ovum Consulting

Various telecoms giants are competing for assets in India. Multiple business development teams of foreign telcos and local conglomerates are preparing their fixed and mobile licence bids in Saudi Arabia - several with Asian partners. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world. Orascom of Egypt already has a stake in Hutch (which in turn has investments in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India) and its CEO has been open about his interest to invest more in Asia. On 15 January 2007, Qtel of Qatar announced a strategic partnership with Singapore Technologies involving an initial commitment of $5,600 million in Asia (last year they jointly bid in Egypt for the third mobile licence but lost against Etisalat). Several Asian operators announced their intention to invest more in Africa and the Middle East, MTC, Etisalat, and others have been seen at major regional conference in Asia.

Telecoms in emerging markets is hot property and a key focus area for bankers, operators and investors that are coming together next week in London at a telecoms finance event to discuss opportunities and further network. What will be interesting is to see how these operators develop their strategies and manage growth. European operators had their share of lessons of investing outside home territories. The new players in the international arena must avoid similar mistakes and manage the balance between strategic vision, implementation and synergy realisation, and money for the assets they acquire. The deal between Qtel and Singapore Technologies makes sense however, particularly if it involves broader thinking about how Singapore and Qatar can learn from each other, and retain or develop their national competitiveness using ICT as a differentiator.

Martin has directed and managed consulting projects in several areas, including business strategy (market entry, marketing strategy and preparing for competition), commercial due diligence and valuation, M&A, merger integration, pricing, channel strategy and optimisation, customer value maximisation and regulation.