India’s Bharti Airtel Limited said yesterday it had ended takeover talks with South Africa’s MTN Group after failing to agree on which company will control a combined entity.

The groups had hoped to create the world’s sixth-largest mobile operator with over 130 million subscribers in 24 countries after first announcing they were in talks on May 5.

But Bharti, India’s leading mobile operator, said it had called off the talks after MTN proposed a new structure which would have seen the Indian group becoming a unit of the South African-based mobile phone operator. Despite talks which dragged on late into Friday night, an agreement could not be reached.

“Further and more importantly, Bharti’s vision of transforming itself from a home-grown Indian company to a true Indian multinational telecom giant, symbolising the pride of India, would have been severely compromised this was completely unacceptable to Bharti,” the Indian company said.

Media and analysts had speculated that Bharti, 30.5 per cent owned by Singapore Telecommunications, was eyeing a 51pc stake in MTN or would engineer their merger in a deal that would value MTN at up to $50 billion.

One Johannesburg-based analyst said any merger would have been difficult as MTN was clearly the biggest group and it would have been a case of “David taking on Goliath.”

“It does not come as a surprise because it’s David taking on Goliath. Quite clearly MTN is the larger of the two, so it would have been a merger of unequals,” said the analyst.

MTN had 68.2m subscribers as of March, compared with Bharti’s 62m. MTN’s annual revenue is $9.6bn, against Bharti’s $6.7bn, according to Citigroup.

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