Mozambique Third Mobile Phone Licence Not Yet Announced,Mozambique Third Mobile Phone ,Third Mobile Phone Licence Not Yet Announced,

The Mozambican Transport and Communications Ministry has failed to meet its own deadline of Friday to announce the successful bidder for the country's third mobile phone licence - but the financial details of all three bids are published in this week's issue of the independent paper "Savana".

The largest bid, of 33 million US dollars, was submitted by the consortium UNI-Telecomunicacoes-CE. This is a joint venture between Energia Capital, part of the Mozambican Insitec Group, and the Angolan company Unitel, headed by Isabel dos Santos, daughter of Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

Energia Capital is one of the Mozambican partners in the consortium that will run the planned new dam on the Zambezi at Mepanda Nkuwa. Among Insitec's other interest is a share in the country's second largest commercial bank, the BCI.
The Movitel consortium offered a bid of 29 million dollars - this group is an alliance between SPI, which is the holding company of Mozambique's ruling Frelimo Party and the Vietnamese company Vietel. Finally the Portuguese company, Portugal Telecom, made a bid of 25 million dollars.

According to the initial calendar, the winning bid should have been announced on 21 October, and the licence fee should have been paid on 2 November. The deadline was extended, and Transport Minister Paulo Zucula promised that the winner would be known in the first week of November. However, by Saturday morning there was still no announcement.

The tender regulations stipulated that at least 25 million dollars should be disbursed for the operating licence. Bidders should have at least two million clients in the countries where they operate, and provide evidence, from their balance sheets for 2007 and 2008, of revenue in excess of 50 million dollars a year.
If finance were the determinant factor, than UNI-Telecomunicacoes ought to win the tender. However, the tender is weighted towards the technical rather than the financial side - for the final decision, the technical proposals of the bidders have a 70 per cent weighting, and the financial proposals only 30 per cent.

Once the winner is announced, it will have 12 months to start its operations. The two existing operators, the publicly-owned M-Cel and the South African company Vodacom, both protested to the government against the decision to award a third licence.
M-Cel claims over four million subscribers, and Vodacom about 2.8 million. So there are at least 6.8 million mobile phone clients in a total population estimated at 22.4 million, about half of whom are under 15 years old. Pretty well everyone who is even moderately well-off now has a mobile phone.
Thus the space for a third operator looks rather limited, unless it can offer prices that are substantially cheaper than those of M-Cel and Vodacom.