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Dubai: NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest wireless operator, said it is in talks with Middle East carriers including Qatar Telecom, etisalat and Saudi Telecom Co as it seeks to expand overseas.
"We're interested in the Middle East and Africa," Toshinari Kunieda, senior vice-president of Global Business at DoCoMo, said in Singapore. "We're currently just chatting but I don't deny equity partnerships in the future."
Having a stake in a Middle East operator including Saudi Telecom and etisalat would help DoCoMo to gain access to markets such as Egypt and South Africa, where mobile-phone demand is growing faster than in Japan. The Tokyo-based company said on June 16 it agreed to pay $350 million to buy a 30 per cent stake in mobile-phone carrier TM International (Bangladesh) Ltd.
"We're interested in the Middle East operators because they have invested in many operators in Africa or Central Asia," Kunieda said.
etisalat and Saudi Telecom, the Arab region"s two largest phone carriers, operate in countries such as Egypt and Indonesia, and Saudi Telecom has customers in markets including Turkey and South Africa.
Qatar Telecom this month agreed to pay S$2.4 billion ($1.8 billion) for a controlling stake in Indonesia"s PT Indosat.
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