Vodafone eyes up South Africa

LEARNING FROM its bitter experience with Verizon Networks, it appears that Vodafone is looking for a controlling interest in South Africa's Vodacom.

"We've said before that we are interested in increasing our stake in Vodacom," Vodafone spokesman Mark Percy told Reuters.

Presently Vodacom is split 50:50 between Vodafone and South Africa's Telkom. It's rumoured that Telkom is going to sell its Vodacom stake to Vodafone and its fixed line business to another mobile operator, MTN.

While Africa can, of course, be viewed as one of the best emerging markets, South Africa is one of the continent's most established markets.

So perhaps Vodafone wants to use Vodacom as a springboard into other less developed African markets, then?

Vodafone hasn't had much luck in Kenya, for example, where it wanted to increase its 25 per cent stake in Kenya's Safaricom mobile phone network.

Vodafone could caught up in a scandal surrounding a mysterious partner, Mobitelia Ventures, which apparently holds a five per cent share of the Safaricom network. µ