Telstra will pay $1.5 billion for 40percentt of a venture that holds mobile phone assets that CyberWorks acquired this month.
Telkom South Africa abandoned talks to sell its mobile and fixed-line phone assets to the Vodafone Group and the MTN Group, ending the possibility of South Africa's biggest takeover.
Mr. Everett calculated that Cheung Kong still carries a single-digit price-earnings ratio, even if the mobile phone assets are valued at zero.
In that sense, the purchase of LinkedIn reminds one of Microsoft's acquisition in September 2013 of the mobile phone assets of Nokia, the Finnish telecoms giant.
These deals include Microsoft's purchase of the phone assets of Finland's Nokia for $7.2 billion, and Cisco's purchase of NDS, a video services company based in Britain, for $5 billion in 2012.
A New York investment firm, Providence Capital, is planning to bid with the Carlyle Group and the Blackstone Group for the mobile phone assets of Auna, a Spanish telecom company, said one executive with knowledge of the private equity groups' plans.
Profit in the year-earlier period was swelled by a one-time gain of 35.82 billion Hong Kong dollars ($4.6 billion) related to the sale of mobile phone assets in India.
In June, UTStarcom announced an agreement that it would buy the cell phone assets of Audiovox for $165.1 million as part of its effort to expand into mass-market mobile phones.
Buying Nokia's phone assets was defensive, and offensive for Microsoft; it regains control, and can use its greater financial resources to push the line harder than Nokia could have.
Its profit declined from the year-ago period, but that was expected due to prior one-time benefits, and the current fiscally deleterious impact of the company's phone assets that didn't exist in the year-ago quarter.
