Financial Times

Dialog Telekom mulls acquisitions in expansion plan
Dialog Telekom is looking at expanding its telecom related businesses following the unprecedented demand, both local and foreign, for its initial public offering.

Retail investors who applied for up to 1,000 shares of the Dialog IPO will be allotted in full. “We will look at any business as long as that helps to bring in synergies to serve the telecom sector. We will take to acquisitions or alliances, treating them as ‘content providers’, which aids Dialog in its core competency,” Tan Sri Radzi Bin Mansor, chairman of Telekom Malaysia, Dialog Telekom’s parent, told The Sunday Times FT.

He said that the company may even look at delivering media channels on their soon-to-be launched 3G or third generation technology. However, he said that expanding the coverage to the whole island will be a primary concern for the company, whose IPO was oversubscribed by an overwhelming six and a half times locally and 12 times by foreign investors.

“We will be concentrating on expanding our network to the rest of the country,” he said. One of the reasons the Dialog IPO has done well is because people need access to communications despite all the political uncertainty and the external complications. “Mobility is something everyone wants to have in any situation,” he said.

The 712.3 million shares had a local retail oversubscription of 4.2 times and a local institutional oversubscription of 1.26 times. “We were overwhelmed at the local oversubscription and it showed that Sri Lankans were confident about their own country,” Mansor said.

Dialog Telekom CEO Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya said that out of the total 53,700 applications, there were 172 foreign institutional and retail applications for the issue. “There were foreign applications in the US$60 to 100 million range,” he said, but did not divulge the names of the applicants.

The qualified local institutional investors would be allocated 25 percent of the offered shares and the retailers will get 35 percent. The foreign investors will get 40 percent.

Dr. Wijayasuriya said that all applicants who have subscribed up to and inclusive of 1,000 shares will be allotted in full. However, all applicants subscribing for more than 1,000 shares will be allocated pro-rata, on the number of shares applied for, from within the total number of shares allocated to each category.

Back to Business