A few big players in the telecom industry have plans to grow their base by acquiring existing smaller telecom service providers. Sources now claim that Airtel has similar plans.
According to sources, Bharti Airtel, which is one of the leading telecom service provider in India, is in talk with Mumbai based Loop Mobile. The latter has mobile telephony licence for the Mumbai circle and boasts of about 3 million customers. As such it is planning on selling the business for a whopping Rs. 750 crores. Not just that, the company is also said to have prevailing debt of about Rs. 400 crores.
Loop mobile owns 8 megahertz of spectrum in the 900 MHz band which is currently valued at Rs. 2624 crore. Further the company has around 2000 operational mobile tower sites. In fact some companies have shown interest only in the tower business. However, should Airtel acquire Loop Mobile, the additional 3 million customer besides its existing 4.1 million customers, would make it number 1 in Mumbai, surpassing Vodafone’s 6.8 million customers.
