In talks with Bharti to offer services in Africa: OnMobile

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Value Added Services (VAS) company OnMobile may be in talks with Bharti to offer services in Africa. It will also invest USD 50-70 million in Telefonica over two years, reports CNBC-TV18 quoting DowJones.

Bharti recently bought Kuwait's Zain, which has operations in 15 African countries.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Arvind Rao, MD & CEO, OnMobile spoke on the company's discussions with Bharti.

Below is a verbatim transcript. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: Could you walk us through what exactly it is that you are in discussion with Bharti over, what this value added services are and what the potential deal size may be?

A: Hi this is nothing more than an extension of existing customer relationships. We have done this standard with Vodafone, with Telefonica, so this is nothing more than just business as usual. Since Bharti is now expanding into Zain, into Africa all bunch of companies like us like OnMobile who provide services to them in India are in discussions with them to rollout same services in Africa. Because they are familiar with us, they know the impact; they know these services work well in emerging markets because it is basically an extension of the same.

Q: So how far have conversations reached so far have conversations reached so far and what is the potential size of the market that you would look at if you were to get the deal?

A: Most likely it is what Bharti is going to do when you are going into value added services which is a very large space. So they will probably enter into agreements with 5-6 companies at least to offer different services based on best of breed.

So typically what they do is they will go vertical by vertical and pick the best of vendors in each different vertical. There are verticals that we are best off in and we specialize in. I'm hopeful that we get awarded the contract in those particular verticals. The size could be fairly large if you roll out across the entire African deployments of Zain, it could be large.