Soon after Bharti walked out from the MTN acquisition race, another Indian company, Reliance Communications (RCOM) chipped in expressing its interest in acquiring the South African telecom major.

But it’s not going to be easy for RCOM to put the deal together. Reliance has to come up with an exceptional business model as the market value of RCOM is $10 billion less than MTN's value. Reliance is way behind MTN even in terms of a customer base as it has about 20 million fewer customers.

Going by the history of Anil Dhirubai Ambani's company and analyzing MTN’s intention over the past few weeks, this deal may also stall. MTN is more inclined to keep the management in its own hands as it asked Airtel to become a subsidiary, which didn’t work out. The same conflict could arise with Reliance too.

In a media statement released by Bharti Airtel, it accuses MTN's of holding an inconsistent attitude in its proposal. The statement reads: “MTN has now presented a completely different structure, from what was agreed. This new structure envisages Bharti Airtel becoming a subsidiary of MTN and exchange of majority shares of Bharti Airtel held by the Bharti family and Singtel, in exchange for a controlling stake in MTN”

Bharti has also thanked American and Europe bankers which had given confident letters of funding of over $60 billion. Bharti is still looking to widen its international reach.

When we asked Sridhar Pai, CEO, of Tonse Telecom to analyse this situation, he said: “At valuations of $35 billion and above too many factors are at play to conclusively provide a prognosis about a deal.”

Sridhar also said: “it will be reckoned as positive if this deal happens as Reliance (or any Indian co) would never be able to generate a global subscriber base of what is now possible - about 130 million subscribers from this combined entity.”

As per industry sources the Reliance staje will apparently be higher as compared to Airtel. The reason being that it has aggressive global telecom plans - from broadband to WiMAX, and from a Hollywood foray to multi-media content and a global cinema and theatre empire. Reliance has its tentacles everywhere.

It will be interesting to see, if Reliance is able to bring this much awaited ‘eye candy’ deal to reality. Before this, not only Airtel but Vodafone had tried its luck to acquire MTN. X