RIYADH, 17 June 2004 — Bidders for a mobile phone operator license in Saudi Arabia are to present their final offers June 26 and the winner is likely to be chosen in late July or early August, a communications official said yesterday.
Telecom giants such as Vodafone of Britain and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom were among 11 consortia which prequalified in April to bid for a license to become the second GSM operator in the Saudi market, which has some eight million mobile users with a growth rate of about 30 percent.
“Each consortium will present two offers — technical and financial — on June 26. The assessment of the technical offers will weed out those who don’t qualify, irrespective of the cost they are proposing,” said Saad Al-Muhareb, PR chief of the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC).
CITC will then publicly open the financial offers of those who remain in the race, in the presence of the media, select the best proposal and submit it to the Cabinet for final approval, Muhareb told AFP. The unveiling of the financial offers is expected to take place at the end of July or in early August, and the winner might also be selected around that time, he said.
The second operator, who will break Saudi Telecom’s monopoly over cellular services, “must be announced by October, according to the government timetable. A third operator will enter the market in 2006,” Muhareb said.
Besides Vodafone and the German company, bidders who prequalified included firms from Austria, Egypt (Orascom), France (Bouygues), Italy, Kuwait (MTC), Malaysia (Maxis), Spain (Telefonica Moviles), South Africa (MTN) and the United Arab Emirates (Etisalat).
Potential bidders had been required to form a consortium of at least five Saudi companies and an international mobile operator, with foreign investors allowed to buy up to 49 percent of the joint company to be set up to operate the new GSM.
