Versatile Amphibian

$388Mn of new African telecoms infrastructure investments were announced in March 2012. It’s too early to tell whether this is a sign of any kind, but the first quarter of this year has been the weakest for African telecoms investment for 3 years. On the flip side, it could just be that investment opportunities are now more difficult to come by – both MTN and Maroc Telecom made announcements this month that they were seeking to invest billions more in “bolt on” operations in African countries in which they don’t currently operate, however with nearly $8Bn of M&A done in the last 3 years targets are getting bigger and more expensive (and that doesn’t include the $10.75Bn Airtel spent on Zain, because it was officially done in Kuwait). The standout deal was actually the smallest. Movicel in Angola spent $10Mn to buy a stock of 100,000 3G enabled tablets from Datawind. By my estimation, there are fewer than half a million PCs in Angola, so this one order almost certainly means that Da...

Lots of conversation but little action would be how I'd characterise the African telecoms investment landscape in February. $200Mn of fresh investments were announced, but although some big deals were mooted - particularly a sell off of tower assets by Etisalat - none materialised, leaving only Vodacom's mobile upgrades in Tanzania and Movicel's selection of Huawei and ZTE to build a small LTE network in Angola to prop up the numbers. Perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise. Only $215Mn of investments were announced in the same month of 2011; suggesting that the $516Mn announced in February 2010 was a bit of an aberration.