Indian telecom group Tata Communications Ltd, not discouraged by the recent failure of Vodacom to acquire its South African subsidiary Neotel, is seeking a new buyer.

On March 2, 2016, a few days after the court of Pretoria rejected the transaction, Tata’s Director General, Vinod Kumar told Reuters: “We have been in discussions with Vodacom so there is no other potential buyer we are engaged with ... however, people in the market have expressed interest and now the time has come for us to explore those options”.

Tata Communications Ltd has been seeking to sell its fixed-line and data focused subsidiary Neotel since 2014. The firm which it acquired in 2008, after beating Telkom by grabbing construction contract for a new fixed-line network in South Africa, seems to no more fit its plans. Vodacom offered R7 billion ($445,900,000) to buy Neotel as it aimed to boost its technical capacities on the high-speed market. However, the deal faced a tenacious opposition from its rivals who said it threatened their business.

Thus, despite being approved by the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (ICASA) and telecom regulators of the Southern African region, Telkom, Cell C, and MTN convinced the South African justice to reject the deal, on the basis that it was threatening to local market’s fairness.