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Article: Call options; The fight for GVT.
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- October 17, 2009
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Foreigners vie for a bigger slice of Brazil's telecoms market
THE bitter fight that has broken out between Telefonica, a Spanish telecoms giant, and Vivendi, a French conglomerate, for control of GVT, a small Brazilian operator, is a measure of the excitement about a booming market that investors believe still has lots of untapped potential. Telefonica has bid $3.7 billion for the firm, topping Vivendi's earlier offer by 14%.
Since Brazil's telecoms monopoly was broken up and privatised in 1998, the number of landlines has more than doubled from 17m to 41m. The growth of mobile phones has been even faster. Brazil already boasts more 165m of them, just ...