Former top bankers Michael Jordaan and Paul Harris are shareholders in a company that has made an offer to buy Wireless Business Solutions (WBS), the company that owns iBurst and Broadlink, TechCentral has established.
Technology company Multisource, in which Jordaan and the Harris family trust are shareholders, has made an offer to acquire WBS.
WBS has access to valuable radio frequency spectrum that could be used to build a national wireless broadband network. In particular, it has access to spectrum in the 1,8GHz band that is ideally suited to building next-generation wireless broadband networks using 4G/LTE technology.
Multisource chairman and shareholder Phumlani Moholi confirms that the company, which was once listed on the JSE, has made an offer to buy WBS, but cautions that the conclusion of the deal is subject to a financial and technical due diligence and the fulfilment of conditions precedent.
“We are at a sensitive stage of the transaction and bound by confidentiality. However, we are willing to engage with yourselves to share more information once we have more clarity,” Moholi tells TechCentral in an e-mail.
Moholi is a former chief technology officer at MTN and chief IT officer for the 2010 Fifa World Cup local organising committee.
On Monday, TechCentral revealed that WBS had received an offer to the business from a then-unnamed entity. WBS nonexecutive director David Hilewitz said then that various authorities, including communications regulator Icasa and the Competition Commission, would still have to give the thumbs up to a deal once the due diligence had been completed successfully.
WBS shareholders include Blue Label Telecoms co-CEOs Brett and Mark Levy, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, Investec, the Public Investment Corp and former WBS CEO Thami Mtshali, who stepped down in August.
It’s not immediately clear why Multisource would be interested in buying WBS. Founded in 1947, the firm says its “core tenet is designing, building, operating and federating next-wave networks”.
“These networks combine radio, wireless, voice, video and [Internet protocol] technologies into a single, integrated communication network,” it says on its website.
The company, which has offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Port Elizabeth, was listed on the JSE in 1988, but subsequently delisted.
InstituteX, an investment company founded by Harris, Moholi and technology entrepreneur Brandon Leigh, acquired a 66% stake in Multisource back in 2010.
Leigh, who serves as Multisource’s CEO, is the former head of Leaf Wireless, the company that distributed HTC products in South Africa until 2012.
Multisource has been on an acquisition trail in the recent past, last year acquiring cloud computing and mobile specialist Motillion. It also bought networking specialist Neology. — © 2014 NewsCentral Media