MTN Pressured to List in Uganda in Latest Africa Regulator Spat

KAMPALA (Capital Markets in Africa) – MTN Group Ltd. is facing pressure to list its unit in Uganda as Africa’s largest mobile-phone company seeks to renew a license in the country.

While selling shares on the local bourse isn’t a pre-condition for the granting of a new 10-year contract, the East African nation wants “Ugandans to be part of the company,” according to Godfrey Mutabazi, the executive director of the country’s telecommunications regulator. MTN’s current license expires in October.

A listing of the Uganda business would follow similar moves by MTN in Ghana and Nigeria — both agreed to by the Johannesburg-based company as part of a deal with regulators. The carrier has been embroiled in a number of spats with local authorities around the continent in recent years, most notably in Nigeria, where it agreed to a $1 billion fine in 2016 alongside an initial public offering of its unit in Lagos.

The carrier is also offering a 35 percent stake of its Ghanaian unit to local investors in return for access to local spectrum, in what will be that country’s biggest-ever initial public offering.

An MTN spokesman said the carrier couldn’t immediately comment on a potential Uganda listing. The shares gained 0.7 percent to 102.16 rand as of 10:01 a.m. in Johannesburg, valuing the company at 192 billion rand ($13 billion).

MTN Uganda has a market share of about 55 percent, Mutabazi said. The company says is had almost 10.9 million customers in the country as of the end of March, compared with more than 221 million across 22 markets in Africa and the Middle East.

Last month, MTN complained that officials from the Internal Security Organisation raided its data center in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and disconnected four servers, posing a risk to customer data.

Source: Bloomberg Business News