Turk Telekom eyes buys
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish fixed-line phone operator Turk Telekom is considering foreign purchases to boost its value ahead of a planned initial public offering of a stake held by the treasury, the company’s chief executive said. Speaking to reporters on Thursday evening, Chairman and CEO Paul Doany also said Turk Telekom could enter the Saudi Arabian market but via a service contract rather than through direct investment. Oger Telecom bought a 55 percent stake of Turk Telekom last year for $6.55 billion (-4.97 billion) in Turkey’s largest privatization. There are plans to hold an IPO for part of the remaining 45 percent which is held by the Turkish Treasury. «We are looking into a number of acquisitions to increase our value ahead of the IPO. We are looking into mobile and fixed-line business in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Central Asia,» Doany said. Analysts say Turk Telekom is interested in investing in Eastern European countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria. No timetable has been set for the IPO but Doany said the company had set itself a target of making the company ready for a public offering by mid-2007. He said the Oger Group, which owns Oger Telecom and which is owned by the Lebanese Hariri family, was looking to increase its presence in Saudi Arabia, as it is based there. «Oger Telecom is competing in Saudi Arabia’s third mobile license. Turk Telekom may well be in Saudi Arabia, not necessarily through direct investment but through a service contract in a project. This will be clear in 2007,» he said. Turk Telekom is projected to have revenues this year some 2 percent less than its 2005 revenues, which stood at 7.5 billion lira (-4 billion), he said. Its 2006 EBITDA is expected to be nearly the same as 2005’s 3.9 billion lira, he added. «Because of a one-off exceptional income item for the resolution of an interconnection conflict with mobile operators in 2005, we had extraordinarily high revenues last year and therefore we will have somewhat smaller revenues this year. But in 2007 we expect to have significantly higher revenues,» Doany said.
