OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday
MOBILE network infrastructure vendors are scrambling to submit bids in the race to build South Africa’s long-delayed third network, which is expected to earn the winner $300-800m.
Groupings including Ericsson, Lucent, Motorola and Siemens say they will hand in bids – a revision of original tenders made almost a year ago – to licence-holder Cell-C by close of business on Monday.
Siemens Telecommunications Managing Director Paul McKibbin said the deal was likely to be worth at least $300m and up to $500-600m, depending on Cell-C’s strategy.
Lucent’s regional sales director John Brown said the deal could be worth $600-800m over five years.
The award of a third cellular licence was made in mid-February to Saudi-backed group Cell-C after a more than 18-month delay caused by legal battles. It allows Cell-C into a rapidly growing and eight-million strong subscriber market.
Many infrastructure firms had spent up to R100m ($13m) preparing for the award of the lucrative permit, including securing sites for telecoms masts, while others like Nokia sharply scaled back operations.
Bidders for the infrastructure work said negotiations with Cell-C were expected to start shortly after the bids were submitted, so the operator can meet its target of rolling out the network before year end.
“Their targeted objective is before year end, so they need to award the contracts very shortly. As a result, we expect to be at the negotiating table in due course. We’re talking in terms of a week or two,” Motorola’s Fred Coetzer said.
The industry regulator ICASA said it was finalising Cell-C’s licence conditions.
Cell-C representative Zwelakhe Mankazana said the main conditions were already set out in the draft licence, but it was still in negotiations with the regulator over the finer points, in particular over issues of spectrum allocation. – Reuters
ZA*BUSINESS:
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