Cairo (APD) - Egypt might postpone next month's expected Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the state-owned Telecom Egypt to early next year because of delays in completing the evaluation process, Egypt's business daily, al-Alam al-Youm, reported on Monday.
"The evaluation process for the company and the fair value of the company's share are not completed yet," said Akil Beshir, chairman of Telecom Egypt.
Egypt's ministry of communications and information technology in August had chosen a proposal by global investment banking firm Credit Swiss First Boston (CSFB) as the best technical and financial proposal for privatizing Telecom Egypt.
"If the evaluation is completed and approved by the cabinet in the coming few days, then the subscription may be announced by the end of the month. But if the process is not completed, the only alterative will be postponing the IPO offering to early next year," Beshir explained.
He added that once the evaluation process is completed the cabinet has to approve the IPO price and the number of offered shares in the public or private placements.
In preparation for privatization, Telecom Egypt carried out a 1:10 share split in October so that the par value of the split shares would be LE 10 per share. Through the share split, the number of Telecom Egypt shares increased to 1.71 billion, up from 171.1 million shares, and the company's capital increased to LE 17.07 billion.
As a result of the share split, Telecom Egypt became the largest company listed on Egypt's bourse in terms of the number of shares and in terms of capital.
The company's net profits rose almost 70% to reach LE 1.03 billion in the first half of 2005, compared to LE 607 million a year earlier.
Telecom Egypt is fully owned by the Egyptian government and has a monopoly over the country's fixed-lines networks.
Telecom Egypt's total number of new subscribers reached 186,000 in August, or 3.5 times the number of new subscribers that had signed up last January. [TS]
By Eman Wahby, APD Staff Writer in Cairo
© APD (Arab Press Digest) 2005
