Essar Group won’t sell Yu

After a lot of wrangling in the media over Essar Group’s announcement that it plans to cut back on its investments in Africa, the company said that it has no intention of selling its stake in Yu, Kenya’s leading telecommunications company.

“Essar remains committed to the African market and is satisfied with its operations in Kenya. It is not evaluating any sell off options,” the company said in a press release.

The original report in India’s Economic Times said that Essar would look to off its Yu brand in Kenya as it pulled out of Uganda and Congo.

According to that report, an unnamed source said that the Indian firm was moving away from telecom as a core base for its outlook.

Analysts in Kenya commented that while leaving Uganda and Congo might be a positive for the company in order to develop other sectors, its footing in Kenya is simply too strong to let a powerful company like ETK go, even with a sell off.

“ETK and the Yu brand are important aspects of the Kenyan telecom industry and to sell them off would have been paramount to a bad decision that could have had major repercussions for the company elsewhere, but now that they have shown that this will not happen, it will be greater success to come for the company,” said Tracy Humlin, a Nairobi-based IT analyst and former consultant with MTN Uganda.

By Janan Yussif