Ooredoo to do due diligence

Nasser Marafih, CEO of Qatar Telecom (Qtel, soon to be rebranded as Ooredoo) has confirmed to reporters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the Qatari group has reached an advanced stage in evaluating its potential bid for a majority stake in Vivendi-controlled Maroc Telecom. The CEO said that Qtel is making a ‘final evaluation’ of the 53% Moroccan telco stake, which has reportedly been valued at approximately USD7 billion by its French owner, and although Marafih would not say whether he considered the mooted price to be reasonable, he noted that the current market value of the asset would not dictate the price his firm was prepared to pay. ‘Sometimes you pay a certain price knowing the asset could give you more value in the future,’ he stated, adding that Morocco was just one of the potential new markets Qtel is evaluating, alongside Libya and Myanmar.