Safaricom Abandons Plans To Acquire Yu Mobile

Earlier on, telecommunications giants Safaricom and Airtel had shown interest in acquiring YU Mobile in a ksh 8.6 Billion deal that would see Safaricom take over YU’s infrastructure and Airtel obtain YU’s prefixes and subscribers. However, after a long wait for the Communications Commision of Kenya to Approve the deal, Safaricom has decided to abandon its campaign.
According to Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore, the management will not waste anymore time waiting for CCK to give them a feedback. As a matter of fact, Bob said that any attempts to reach the Chairman of the commision has been futile.
“We have pulled out of this deal unfortunately. We can’t waste more time waiting for CCK to say a word about this. It’s been a month now and the regulator has said nothing about it. We feel the delay is too much and for us the takeover is something that was time-bound,” said Mr Collymore, “As far as we are concerned, this is the longest we can wait for the transaction to be concluded. And there are a couple of things that are unclear. Particularly, we can’t understand why the regulator says totally nothing. Plus we all know the term of current board expires on April 2 which means we could be subjected to a longer wait.”
YU Mobile’s country manager Madhur Taneja has also expressed his concerns on the delay and is afraid that it could cost the company the deal that he describes as the best they could ever get.
“It will be extremely unfortunate if we lost a good deal because of delays that can be avoided. This would also show the regulator in very bad light for other foreign investors interested in this market,” he said.
Any attempts by Daily Nation to speak to the Chairman of the commission have also yielded no fruits.
Additional reporting by Daily Nation.