Johannesburg - French telecoms giant Orange is expanding its South African presence with the launch of an Internet service provider in the next few months, but has yet to make a foray into the mobile space.
Orange is present in SA through Orange Horizons, which launched in January 2013, to act as the company’s presence in countries where it is not present as a consumer operator.
In South Africa, it has an online presence as well as a physical store, which it opened in mid-year after Nashua Mobile closed down, ending the companies’ relationship that provided Orange with a bricks and mortar presence.
Now the company is launching as an ISP and also aims to offer triple-play and - at a later, as yet to be determined time, quad-play. However,it has yet to make inroads with its ambition to launch a virtual mobile network operation, a dream that has been on the cards for some time.
Orange Horizons CEO Sebastien Crozier says the company, long tipped as a potential buyer for Cell C, sees SA’s market as saturated as there are “already enough infrastructure players”. As a result, Orange would rather enter the country as a virtual operator - along the lines of Virgin Mobile - and not as a fully-fledged cellphone player.
However, SA’s licensing conditions are currently too onerous for this to happen, says Crozier in an interview with IOL Business. He adds the company has not had any talks around buying Cell C and has no plans to purchase it, although this could change in future.
Earlier this month, Telkom said it Telkom said it was in talks to buy Cell C, South Africa’s third-biggest mobile-phone company. The fixed-line operator, 40 percent owned by the government, had previously bid R14 billion for a majority stake in Cell C, which was rejected by Cell C’s majority owner, Oger Telecom, which owns 75 percent, Bloomberg has reported.
Crozier notes, even as Orange continues to expand in Africa, South Africa remains an important destination for the company. He says: “We can’t not imagine being in the first [most industrialised] economy in Africa.”
Orange, which has 263 million customers worldwide with 111 million in Africa and the Middle East, is currently looking to buy Airtel's subsidiaries in Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville and Sierra Leone.
This comes after it sold its 70 percent stake in Telkom Kenya to Helios Investment Partners, the Africa-focused private equity firm.
Orange generated 39 billion euros in sales last year and has 155 000 staff worldwide.
IOL