O-Tel Telecoms, Licenced National Telecoms ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ Provider, reviews its plans after the recent boost in Merger & Acquisitions activity within the Telecoms Sector as the company seek strategic growth and cost reduction.
M&A activity is not new for the Telecoms industry, especially with the increased emphasis on building Telecoms Infrastructure to encourage Telecoms independence and increase competition to the incumbents.
According to Mohammad Patel, CEO of O-Tel Telecoms, ” Mergers and acquisitions enable companies to increase their scale, reduce costs, as well as improve their access to capital, equipment, valuable skills and expertise, which in turn leads ideally to increased profits and service levels. These factors have led many industry participants, from small cap to large cap, to discover growth opportunities from both inside and outside of M&A transactions as they work to increase shareholder value.”
Recent deals such as O-Tels acquisition of Rheid Communications in 2011, and Reunerts acquisition of ECN to boost its fading Nashua Mobile LCR base, illustrate the value placed on consolidation as a key strategy for long-term growth.
Patel adds, “You need to have scale to be able to bear the risks that you are going to need to be able to deploy cloud services, inter-connect, increase subscribers, changing LCR income etc. It also helps companies to diversify its portfolio by finding a complimentary firm and increasing overall scale.”
O-Tel offers a full array of VoIP services such as 1Cloud Hosted PBX, SIP Trunking, Fax over IP, and the soon to be launched Centrex Cloud Call Center to a network of partners nationwide. These partners are in the PBX, IT Service, LCR, Wireless and ISP field. The VoIP services are securely backhauled into the companys’ national MPLS infrastructure. An enterprise internet breakout facility has recently been enabled to allow maximum usage of the backhaul link.
“Since 2008, O-Tel has constantly been upgrading its network to meet thousands of clients demand. O-Tel currently possesses a respectable and stable carrier grade network which has cost much money and time to establish. To maximise Return on Investment (ROI) we need to rapidly add more users to our already sizeable database. This can be done either via a) O-Tel acquiring players in the PBX/LCR industry who owns an established database and wish for a smooth transition into the Digital Telephony era, or b) a merger with a larger company who has a substantial dealer database and wish to add more value by offering Cloud telecom services.” explains Mohammad Patel.
O-Tels acquisition of Rheid Communications last year transitioned very smoothly, with O-Tel filtering out the end users and keeping the resellers. O-Tels high quality VoIP and value added services enabled these former Rheid resellers to grow from strength to strength, receiving promotion to partner level. Today, they handle hundreds of clients, and port a sizeable batch of numbers monthly. Their profitability has also trebled with the aid of O-Tels world class 24/7 Automated Billing System and efficient procedures.
“There’s an exciting time ahead. We’ve already been in talks with various JSE listed companies, but O-Tel’s exploration is focused on acquiring or merging with companies who share a similar vision of rocketing the local telecoms industry into “The Cloud” by offering cloud based telephony services via a national partner/reseller network.” concludes Patel.