CAIRO: Telecom Egypt said its third quarter profit jumped nearly 35 percent, helped by gains on its investment in mobile operator Vodafone Egypt and more mobile traffic on its network. Egypt s fixed-line monopoly also said it had agreed with Egypt s Orascom Telecom to liquidate their joint venture in Algeria. Telecom Egypt is on track to meet its full-year revenue growth target of between 2 and 3 percent, Chief Financial Officer Tarek Tantawy told Reuters. Third quarter net profit was LE 951.6 million ($172 million). The company said third quarter revenue grew 11 percent to LE 2.7 billion. Both the retail and the wholesale segments of the business posted record sales in the third quarter as Telecom Egypt benefited from an increase in mobile traffic across its infrastructure, plus the effects of its tariff rebalancing initiative, the company said. Egypt s telecommunications regulator approved increases of up to 50 percent in some charges for telephone calls on landlines in June. Telecom Egypt and Orascom Telecom, which had long complained that state-owned Algerie Telecom was receiving preferential treatment in Algeria, said they would exit the venture. The Algeria unit, known as Lacom, was Algeria s first privately owned fixed-line operator. Each company had owned 50 percent. We have decided to exit the Algerian market and direct our resources to other promising opportunities, Telecom Egypt said. For this reason, we have taken the unfortunate decision to liquidate our joint venture with immediate effect. Tantawy said Telecom Egypt was looking to buy an integrated fixed-line and mobile operator in the Middle East. The company had previously said it could spend more than $1 billion on an acquisition and hoped to conclude a deal this year. Telecom Egypt said total fixed-line subscribers reached 11.3 million by the end of September.
