The Competition Commission has approved Webafrica’s acquisition of rival Mweb, with conditions.

The commission said on Thursday that Webafrica will have to “address public interest concerns” by adopting and implementing an employee share ownership programme and a transaction involving historically disadvantaged persons.

It did not immediately provide details about how it expects Webafrica to implement the scheme.

“The commission found that the proposed transaction is unlikely to result in substantial prevention or lessening of competition in any relevant markets,” it said.

TechCentral broke the news last month that Webafrica had agreed to buy Mweb, one of South Africa’s oldest and largest internet service providers, from Dimension Data.

Sean Nourse, Webafrica’s MD, confirmed to TechCentral that the parties had signed the paperwork and that the deal, once approved, would double the company’s workforce. No layoffs are anticipated.

Nourse, who previously headed up Mweb for Dimension Data, moved to Webafrica three years ago. Mweb, which is headed by Manelisa Mavuso, will continue to operate independently.

MWeb sale

Nourse declined to say how many customers Mweb has on its books, but they number in the hundreds of thousands. A majority of these are on fibre, though the business still has a large legacy copper DSL base as well as customers on fixed-LTE services.

Dimension Data CEO Alan Turnley-Jones said previously that the sale of Mweb was in line with the IT services group’s “strategy of focusing on core markets servicing the enterprise client base”.