Norway’s Telenor and Malaysia’s Axiata Group are in talks to run a jointly owned telecoms giant in South and Southeast Asia with nearly 300 million customers, reported Bloomberg.
The proposed transaction will form an entity with sales of about $13 billion and earnings of about $5.5 billion. Potential “synergies” from the deal would amount to about $5 billion, according to Telenor, set to own 56.5 percent of the new company. Telenor shares rose as much as 5 percent in Oslo.
The merged group would be worth $40 billion, including debt, a person with knowledge of the matter said, making the deal the largest cross-border merger in Asia, excluding China and Japan.
“The bottom line is we need the scale, we need the synergy, we need the balance sheet, we need the strong capabilities of both companies. If we can combine that it will be powerful,” Axiata group CEO Jamaludin Ibrahim told a news conference.
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