Telemobil, the operator of the mobile telephony network Zapp, is in advanced talks over getting a foreign funding worth approximately $100 million, which money will be used for network expansion-related investments, sources on the market say.
The financing could come in form of a loan granted by four American banks headed by US Exim, the United States' foreign trade bank. US Exim will secure the loan and might even contribute part of the funds.
Telemobil and the American banks have largely reached an agreement, yet detailing the terms of the loan might take about two more months.
If it gets this funding, Telemobil will have concluded one of the biggest loan agreements ever achieved by a private Romanian company.
"Telemobil is looking for funds and has contacted a number of financial institutions," Telemobil officials told Ziarul Financiar. They did not care to make further comment on the issue at hand.
The $100 million loan is the most important component of a complex financing programme started by Telemobil this year. The company had taken out another loan, worth $20 million, from Citibank Romania several weeks ago. Back then, Telemobil's President of the Board of Directors Cuneyt Turktan announced the funding supplied by Citibank was part of an extensive investment strategy aimed at broadening Zapp's coverage and product range.
The powerful involvement of the American banks in this project is due to both the majority shareholder of Telemobil, American Qualcomm Group, and to the fact that the equipment used in the expansion of the network will be bought from US giant Lucent Technologies, the quoted sources say. After all, US Exim's main role is to stimulate American exports.
Romania is considered a "democratic" country as far as telecom technology is concerned, because it did not favour a specific equipment vendor. Every operator so far has generally preferred to work with the equipment supplier based in the same country wherein the majority shareholder was based.
On the other hand, the mobile telephony market is seeing a worldwide battle, with two standards as contenders - the GSM (created by Europeans) and the CDMA (created by the Americans and embraced by Zapp).
In case Zapp-US Exim negotiations come through, Lucent will land a major contract, considering the recession the telecom equipment industry has been facing for a while now.
Qualcomm, the group that developed the CDMA technology (used by the Zapp service) worldwide acquired the controlling interests (99.5%) in Telemobil through Inquam Limited in 2001. laurentiu.ispir@zf.ro
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