Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) may help with the funding for Bharti Airtel's $9 billion acquisition of Zain's African assets, a senior SingTel executive said on Friday.

SingTel, Southeast Asia's largest telecoms firm that owns 32 percent of Bharti, said the acquisition would be financed by debt, and there was no need to inject money directly into its Indian affiliate since the deal would not dilute its stake.

"In one way or the other we will be part of the funding, we are a very substantial shareholder of Bharti," SingTel's CEO International Lim Chuan Poh told Reuters in an interview.

Bharti and Zain are in exclusive talks until March 25 for the Kuwaiti firm's operations in 15 African countries and have agreed on an enterprise value of $10.7 billion for the assets, including $1.7 billion of debt on Zain Africa books.

Bharti's bid is in line with the ambitions of SingTel, which is sitting on over $1 billion in cash and wants to enter the fast-growing African market to offset its presence in more saturated telecoms markets such as Singapore and Australia.   

But the market value of Bharti, the leading Indian mobile operator, has plunged since it confirmed the deal on concerns that possible high debt for funding the transaction could stretch its balance sheet.

"It will definitely be through debt for the amount that we are talking about," said Lim, a former Singapore government bureaucrat who joined SingTel in 1998.
 SingTel, 54 percent owned by Singapore state investor Temasek, has spent S$18 billion in recent years to buy stakes in fast growing telecoms markets such as India and Indonesia.

The company has previously said it is also interested in Vietnam, where it has no presence, but Lim said costs were now outweighing revenues in the mobile market there because of price competition among operators.

"The prospect has gone from very good to pretty dicey," he said, adding it was still a country that interested SingTel given the growth outlook for providing broadband and data services. - Reuters