Vodacom and Remgro will head to court in July in a final bid to gain approval for the proposed merger of their fibre assets.
On March 6, the Competition Appeal Court informed the parties their appeal will be heard on July 22-24, according to updates published late on Friday by the two listed groups.
The merger of the two fibre businesses was rejected by the Competition Tribunal in October.
The proposed merger would have seen Vodacom take a 30% stake in Remgro’s telecom unit Community Investment Ventures Holdings (CIVH), operating as Maziv, together worth an estimated R13bn — with the option of increasing the stake to 40%.
The transaction, announced in November 2021, was approved by SA’s telecom regulator but failed to gain the backing of the Competition Commission, which conducted an investigation that took almost 22 months.
The companies had lodged provisional appeals to that outcome, pending the tribunal publishing its reasons for not allowing it to go through.
“The transaction parties still await the reasons of the Competition Tribunal for prohibiting the merger, which is necessary for the appeal process to progress as planned,” said the companies.
Besides stymying the mobile operator’s plans to substantially increase its fibre footprint nationwide, the tribunal also puts the brakes on Maziv gaining access to billions of rand to continue rolling out fibre infrastructure, especially into lower-income areas.
Because of the long process and delays, Vodacom and Remgro have had to push out the completion date for the transaction several times.
Most recently, the transaction long stop date had been pushed to March 14. This has now been pushed out to April 30.
Maziv had committed to capital expenditure of at least R10bn over five years, including rolling out fibre infrastructure past at least 1-million new homes in lower income areas.
The parties had also committed to creating as many as 10,000 jobs and establishing a R300m enterprise and supplier development fund.
The commission said the conditions offered did not fully address the resultant harm to competition and welcomed the tribunal’s decision.
Last week, Maziv — which houses Vumatel, SADV, Rise Telecoms and BritelinkMCT — received good news when the Competition Commission said it had approved Vumatel’s purchase of internet provider Herotel.
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