India’s leading telecom company Bharti Airtel announced it had renewed its effort for a significant partnership with MTN Group Limited and is exploring a potential transaction whereby, pursuant to a scheme of arrangement.

The deal, from whatever details were available, looked like a good one. Bhavesh Gandhi of India Infoline said Bharti was the first company from the top-three Indian telecom companies to first move to acquire a company abroad. “However, concerns on the topline and return on capital both would weigh on the share price because of the acquiring scale — Bharti has a lot of scale with almost 100 million subscribers,” he said. “Also, MTN has operations in Sudan and Iran so how the legal framework comes up remains to be seen.”