Latin America met Africa as Telefónica welcomed MTN to its strategic partner program, designed to generate additional scale and geographical reach.

MTN is headquartered in South Africa, but has operations across the whole of Africa including Nigeria, where it was recently fined by the government. Telefónica is a Spanish company but has operations in much of Latin America, so the two of them have a lot of developing market experience between them.

Specific targets of the partnership include enterprise – especially multinational companies that operate in both regions – and emerging categories such as M2M. They will also collaborate on strategic initiatives around new industry opportunities and how to better exploit existing ones.

“MTN Group believes this strategic partnership with Telefónica, one of the biggest and most advanced operators in the world, will bring great benefits to MTN in enabling future growth delivery,” said Herman Singh, Group Chief Digital Officer at MTN. “The development scope includes our innovation process and new product offerings as we move into the New Digital World, as well as leveraging our combined scale in areas such as procurement. We are really looking forward to developing this relationship to our mutual benefit.”

“Telefónica has a strong belief in the advantages of scale and pooling of skills that industry partnerships can bring,” said Mario Martín, Telefónica’s Industrial Alliances Group Director. “And we are especially proud of having MTN Group, a player with outstanding track record, joining forces with Telefonica under the Partners Program. We are confident that this agreement will bring important benefits to both our Groups.”