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Dubai - Oger Telecom is looking at the possibility of selling its majority stake in Cell C, the chairperson of the Middle Eastern firm told Reuters on Thursday.
Goldman Sachs has been appointed by Oger Telecom to help with the process, Mohammed Hariri told Reuters in an interview in Dubai.
"All options are open. If we get a good price, we will sell," Hariri said, adding it had been approached by several interested parties but no firm decisions had been made. He declined to name the parties.
Hariri said the decision by Oger, which owns 75% of Cell C, was triggered by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa)'s revised plan for cutting the termination fee which operators charge competitors to carry their calls.
READ: Vodacom revenue slides on mobile fee cuts
"For us, if we get a proper value, we'd rather not continue. If the termination rates were honoured as original, we would have stayed easily," he said.
ICASA announced in February last year that it planned to halve by 2016 the termination fee of 20c a minute, a move which brought a legal challenge by the country's two largest operators - MTN [JSE:MTN] and Vodacom [JSE:VOD].
ICASA then revised its plan in September, deciding that rates should instead be cut to 8c by March 2017.
Providers with smaller customer bases are most sensitive to changes in the termination fee, since more calls made by their users are to customers of other networks.
Cell C has been in an aggressive price war with its two main rivals in a bid to gain market share. It had 19.6 million users at the end of 2014 with revenue up 16% last year.
