Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecoms tycoon behind Orascom and Weather Investments, is taking classes on how to win friends and influence people after branding the ‘Big 3’ Canadian telcos “a joke” and Canada a “backwater.”
His comments in national…
Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecoms tycoon behind Orascom and Weather Investments, is taking classes on how to win friends and influence people after branding the ‘Big 3’ Canadian telcos “a joke” and Canada a “backwater.”
His comments in national newspaper The Globe & Mail, where he described himself as: “crazy and adventurous,” appeared as he visited his newly launched telecom operator, Wind Telecom in Toronto.
Wind Telecom is the first foreign entrant into what has been a closed shop dominated by BCE, Telus and Rogers Communications.
Sawiris, who has made a career of extracting value from tricky emerging markets such as North Korea, Pakistan and Iraq, is now aggressively pushing his operations across Canada. He believes that in the future the world will be dominated by just a handful of telecoms companies and is in merger talks with Russian giant, Vimplecom.
He said: “We go where people don’t dare to go,” and taking on the entrenched Big 3 in Canada will be a challenge as he describes Canada as a country with an investment climate worse than the emerging markets in which he usually operates.
Wind is unsettling the incumbents, and according to Sawiris they have already tried to take him out of the market.
“I have been offered by two of them to buy me out at a very significant profit,” Sawiris told the Globe & Mail, “But that means I’m a broker, not an industrialist. It’s against my saga, against my history. I’m not the kind of guy who goes out for the money. It’s about success. And this, I would consider it as a bribe.”
He means to stay and claimed that ultimately his empire would swallow up Canada’s two other fledgling wireless firms, Mobilicity and Public Mobile, which he says have no hope against the incumbents. “They will be dead on arrival,” he said. “Wind should be the consolidator of all the smaller players here. We are going to be open to that. We are not interested in smaller players that are only coming with cash, or the licenses they paid cash for. We want them to succeed and have some subscribers. Because we can’t do the job alone.”
