$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...
Thoughts on strategy in a Digital Economy