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Qtel, San Miguel to acquire Philippine phone company |
MANILA: San Miguel Corp, the Philippine food and beverages major, seeking to borrow as much as $2bn for acquisitions, will buy control of a local phone company as part of a partnership with Qatar Telecom.
The company on Monday announced a venture with Qtel to “look into opportunities in the wireless broadband, mobile and mobile broadband businesses in the Philippines.”
Qtel provides phone services in 16 countries.
The nation’s biggest food and drink company is buying 60% of Liberty Telecommunications Holdings, San Miguel president Ramon Ang said in a mobile-phone message yesterday. The company will use Liberty in its venture into telecommunications with Qtel, Ang said, without providing further details.
San Miguel is seeking control of Petron Corp, the Philippines’ largest oil refiner, and has bought 27% of Manila Electric Co, the nation’s biggest power retailer. San Miguel is expanding into faster-growing industries such as energy and mining, as well as those with wider margins, such as telecommunications.
The telecommunications industry “is still largely untapped, so it’s a potentially new growth area,” Ricardo Puig, an analyst at ATR-Kim Eng Securities Inc in Manila, said in a phone interview yesterday. “Larger players reported 50% growth in broadband subscribers this year, which shows the potential of the business.”
Ang was elected chairman of Liberty on Tuesday, the phone company said in a statement on Wednesday. Liberty also approved an increase in its capital by issuing preferred shares until May 2010, the statement said.
Liberty posted a loss of 409mn pesos in 2007, its seventh straight year of being unprofitable, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
San Miguel had an operating margin of 8% in the three months ended September, compared with 42% for Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co, the nation’s biggest company by value. Globe Telecom Inc’s margin during the same period was 34%.
“It’s too soon to speculate on anything, but given the partnership with Qatar, perhaps they can capitalise on overseas Filipinos” in the Middle East, Puig said.
The Philippines has been sending workers abroad for four decades, and the money they send home accounts for more than a tenth of the country’s $144bn-economy. A record 1.08mn Filipino workers went overseas last year boosting the total abroad to more than 8mn. – Bloomberg |
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