France Telecom and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo are reportedly leading the race to buy a stake in India’s Wireless-TT Infoservices, the mobile towers business owned by Indian conglomerate Tata Group. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Tata Group has been looking to sell the business for the past six months after the unit was spun-off from Tata Teleservices, India’s sixth-largest telecoms firm, in May. The business currently operates 14,000 towers but the number is expected to increase in order to support Tata Teleservices’ network expansion plans; the operator has recently won both new GSM and CDMA licenses in India. A separate report by Dow Jones Newswires claims Tata Teleservices is in talks with four unnamed companies regarding the sale of a 49 percent stake in Wireless-TT Infoservices. Sources note that the company would eventually need to scale up to around 38,000 towers, which would dramatically increase the value of the stake. A Wall Street Journal source said he expected discussions to continue for another two or three months.

NTT DoCoMo’s interest is deemed to be part of a wider overseas expansion strategy aimed at achieving 10 percent of its sales from foreign ventures in a decade. In June, the Japanese market-leader paid US$350 million for a 30 percent stake in Bangladesh’s third-largest mobile operator, Aktel, and this week invested US$10 million to acquire an 11.5 percent stake in Blue Ocean Wireless (BOW), an Irish company providing GSM services to the merchant maritime sector.